to help you discover the God you already know

Category: Being alive

The gifts and the giver

TIME AFTER TIME I came to your gate with raised hands, asking for more and yet more.
You gave and gave, now in slow measure, now in sudden excess.
I took some, and some things I let drop; some lay heavy on my hands; some I made into playthings and broke them when tired; till the wrecks and the hoard of your gifts grew immense, hiding you, and the ceaseless expectation wore my heart out.
~ Rabindranath Tagore, Fruit Gathering 26

My father and his parents, Peru, c. 1932
My father and my grandparents, Peru, c. 1932

When I was young, I received presents from my grandmother (my father’s mother) every Christmas and on my birthday. I remember one fascinating encyclopaedia she sent me that had great pictures. One of the post-celebration trials was to send a thank you letter. This was the extent of my connection to her. She lived on the Devon/Cornwall border, which was a long way from Essex back in the 1960s, and although we visited her once, I have no memory of her. She and my grandfather lived separate lives, and I have only the vaguest of a vague half-memory of either of them. As I look back now, I can only imagine that there had been some rift between my father and his parents, who separated when he was young.

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Lass auch Dir die Brust bewegen, Liebchen, höre mich!

Thrush (photo by Julian Maddock)

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

Mary Oliver: In Blackwater Woods

I was listening to Radio 3 over breakfast on Wednesday. Bryn Terfel was interviewed and asked to recommend a recording. He chose Schubert’s Ständchen sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau partnered on the piano by Gerald Moore – “the definitive recording for many people,” the presenter said. Listen to it on YouTube, or BBC Sounds at about 1’12” in.

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Molecular loneliness, molecular belonging

July 2018: I go with family to the observatory at Herstmonceux. We listen to a talk about the telescopes. We are shown pictures of starry skies from when the telescopes were operational. One photograph has a patch of dark sky. Or so it seems. More recently, the story goes, the Hubble space telescope was trained on that patch for three months to intercept lonely, long-distance-running photons. Like a magic trick, a teeming starfield appears. That dark patch is bright. 

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