Reading Dag Hammarskjöld can sometimes be like putting on a thick jacket, hat and gloves and walking out into a winter landscape. He was himself a keen mountaineer and lover of winter mountain landscapes. His stern, austere view of life and duty and destiny brings a bracing chill to his view of his own life and indeed his understanding of each human life lived responsibly. There is in Markings a constant thread of memento mori and at the start of 1951 the first line of his diary is a concentrated focus on the urgency of life responsibility: "night is drawing nigh". The allusion is to a famous Swedish hymn, which in turn echoes the biblical urgency of time passing and eternity not far off, "the hour is coming when no one can work".
One of Hammarskjöld's poems plays with the seriousness of life, and the moral imperative of using the gift of life responsibly by living in the reality of existence and not in the illusion of our own importance:
Lean fare, austere forms,
Brief delight, few words.
Low down in cool space
One star —
The morning star.
In the pale light of sparseness
lives the Real Thing
And we are real.
Those are the lines of a man unafraid to look life and death in the face, but not with Stoic indifference; on the contrary, with a defiance that is on the side of life, reality, responsible human action geared towards mercy, justice and the righting of what can be righted, and the confronting of wrong as a matter of principle. Any adequate reading of Hammarskjöld's biography makes it clear he was a man of inner granite. His own search was for an for integrity, life purpose and human achievement worthy of the sacrifice it takes to surrender in obedience to God. For there is no doubt that by 1951 Hammarskjöld had come to see and to hear the call of "the Real Thing", that which constitutes and sustains the reality and ultimate significance of all else.
Hammarskjöld's sense of vocation, discovered purpose, and awareness of the personal cost that might shatter the person he thought he was, had been in my mind for several days as I made my way again through Markings, guided this time by the Swedish theologian Gustav Aulen's book on Hammarskjöld. Life and death, achievement and sacrifice, obedience and cost, vocation and surrendered freedom: Markings is laced with those inner questionings that are inevitable when coming to terms with the unavoidable but at times excruciating tensions within which we are at times called to live. In one of those brief entries we wish we could place in exact context, Hammarskjöld in ironic mode: "He received – nothing. But for that he paid more than others for their treasures." This is not so much a complaint by Hammarskjöld; it looks back to his long meditation on Jesus in the upper room, the One who was "absolutely faithful to a divined possibility…"
"a young man adamant in his commitment, who walks the road of possibility to the end without self-pity or demand for sympathy fulfilling the destiny he has chosen – even sacrificing affection and fellowship when the others are unready to follow him – into a new fellowship." (69)
And there again is the agonising dichotomy – "the destiny he has chosen" – because Hammarskjold had come to see in Jesus, "the young man adamant in his commitment", one who was destined and called and who chose the way of obedience to that call. Any serious Christian commitment must reckon with that same sense that life is gift, and its purpose the giving of that gift in service to the lives of others.
In the pale light of sparseness
lives the Real Thing
And we are real.
Christian life is an adamant commitment to the Real Thing, for only so can it be true that "we are real", and this life is the reality within which we are realised, fulfilled and consummated within the purposes of God. All of this I've been thinking about off and on as I've been reading Hammarskjold, and of course doing other things. Like going out into this real world and living, enjoying, working, looking, but still thinking.
At the very edge of the Forest of Birse is a defiant old Rowan tree. Much of it is now dead wood, but there they are, red berries on the surviving branches still doing what life does. Still there after all those winters, its berries gifts and seeds for the future. Against a blue sky, and in late summer heat, it is both memento mori and memento vitae.
This old blasted tree stopped me in my tracks; at that precise point the word that fitted exactly what I was seeing was "defiant". It was one of those moments when what is already in the mind intersects with what is now seen in the world outside the mind. Our duty to live the gift of life; the truth, so hard at times, that life is not forever, that "night is drawing nigh."
But as well as that the miracle and mystery of continuing fruitfulness right up to the end, that out of life lived sacrificially and gratefully come the seeds of further life. And then the great grace that could never be imagined far less expected as deserved. Life lived towards God, seeking in our weaknesses and failures, our hopes and joys, our loves and griefs, by that same grace praying to be "faithful to a divined possibility"; and the graced promise that such a life bears fruits that can never be counted, calculated or gainsaid, but which are harvested and gathered into the eternal mercies of God as the "divined possibilities" of our lives.
Give us peace with Thee
Peace with men and women
Peace with ourselves
And free us from all fear.
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