Day 92 - No coward soul is mine

I have surprising amounts of empathy with Emily Bronte, not just because of Wuthering Heights, which is a novel much maimed by popular misinterpretation. She wrote a lot of poetry too and I would recommend a slow, thoughtful reading of No Coward Soul Is Mine.

It begins with this verse –

No coward soul is mine,

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere:

I see Heaven’s glories shine,

And faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.

From childhood, both the author and I wrestled with the issue that for life to exist, something has to die – constantly. Easy, romanticised optimism is misguided. Eternity contains brutality.

Most people that I know decline to face that, preferring to either ignore it, or else blandly see it as ‘mystery’. That seems odd given that Jesus embodies the same point – His violent, cruel death is what allows us the hope sharing in God’s power that is beyond life and death. Like my inspiration, Emily Bronte, I find it authentic to embrace God as being beautiful but also terrifying. However, to locate that authenticity, we have to engage the fact that life is always sustained by death. Animals eat animals and plants; plants depend upon decay.

Paul noted this too, in Romans 8, especially verse 22 and following. It also appears in Revelations 21-22, especially 21:1-5. Given space, this can be expanded to encompass the whole Biblical range from Genesis, via Jesus through Romans and onto the culmination in Revelations. The story of Creation involves a broken, fallen world. Jesus does not ignore or avoid sickness, death and suffering. He doesn’t apologise for these things. He acts to restore what was broken by the fall. That message is not the one of the churches, which tends to be a combination of platitude and avoidance.

Being alive in this world definitely includes facing that it is both wonderful and also heart-breaking at the same time. If churches conspire to shield people, within them and outside, from that, then they are also hiding the Jesus that calmed the storm [Mark 4:39], the Jesus that reveals that God is not subject to death. Him being resurrected after all the cruelty that the world could subject Him to [John 20 for example].

We do neither God nor humanity any use by pretending that life here and now is ‘nice and fluffy’. ‘All creation is groaning’ as Paul memorably puts it.

One point is that we are a bit worried in talking about the fall as being an explanation of the omnipresence of death and suffering. If we don’t, we undermine that God in Jesus deals with these universals. If we avoid thinking about the fall, then we also fail to grasp that Jesus’ work is all about restoration.

As Emily Bronte puts it at the end of her poem;

With wide-embracing love

Thy Spirit animates eternal years,

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

Though Earth and moon were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be,

And Thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,

Nor atom that his might could render void:

Thou — Thou art Being and Breath,

And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

John Cartwright