Ever since R E O White, previous Principal of the Scottish Baptist College, mentor, friend and occasionally ascerbic critic, brought a lecture alive with these last lines of Browning’s Paracelsus, they have expressed for me that defiant hopefulness that is part of faith when it is at its most desperate.
Advent is coming – arise shine, your light has come…
O come, O come Emmanuel….., – God with us. The presence that pierces the gloom – that is what Browning means in these lines which fully recognise that the danger and the darkness are real, but yet know, that in that place where knowing matters most, what is really real is the light of God, as it shines in Christ, and the darkness cannot comprehend it, or overcome it.
If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time;
I press God’s lamp
Close to my breast;
Its splendour soon or late
Will pierce the gloom;
I shall emerge one day.
Robert Browning, Paracelsus
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