Here’s my favourite love poem, written by William Butler Yeats. It expresses the vulnerability and willing risk-taking that I think always gives love its capacity to make, and break and mend again, the human heart. And if anyone calls me a romantic, or a sentimentalist, I can think of worse epithets.
He wishes for the cloths of heaven
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
But I’m not only quoting a love poem as a piece of emotional exhibitionism. I am at present beginning to build some research and writing around the ideas of vulnerability, love as precarious risk, and self-emptying as a gospel response to self-absorption
. There is a paradox in love as risk, because the prayeful hopefulness of our deepest longings arise from our being open to the presence, and the cost of the presence, of the other. Underlying the powerful undertow of Yeats’ poem is the recognition of the lover being open to the risk of rejection, hurt and trampled dreams.
The word kenosis is usually used as a term for a certain approach to Christology. But I am interested in kenosis as a spiritual principle rooted in the mind of Christ and characteristic of discipleship as we follow after Christ, carrying our cross, and loving the world by self giving service, generous space creating hospitality and love that eschews calaculation in favour of risk.
‘He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, that we, through his poverty might become rich’. Is it stretching too far to see the self-emtpying Christ of Philippians 2, taking the form of a servant, obedient even to death on a cross, as God in Christ spreading his dreams under our feet….tread gently for you tread on His dreams….for you, and a broken but loved creation.
Leave a Reply