Poetry Friday XIII

I have had a somewhat rugged week this week, primarily in my attempts to help someone else extricate themself from a bad situation, which has also made me relive certain agonies of my own at times. I have spent a lot of time talking, counteracting, thinking through the right response. I have thought about what is that one thing that would change the mind, and so change heart, and make changing the situation an easier thing. In the end, cliched as it may seem, you simply have to believe that God is good, no matter what happens and what he requires - doubt that and you'll be assailed by all sorts of horrors. For myself I have been thrashing the hymn, "Come thou Fount of every blessing". I have already mentioned Justin Moffatt's talks at the ENGAGE conference, based on this hymn, and it is just extremely convenient that Sara Groves, my latest music obssession, has recorded it. Here's a verse of it (which I think is perhaps a Sara combination):

Oh to grace how great a debtor

Daily I’m constrained to be

Let your goodness like a fetter

Bind my wandering heart to thee

Jesus sought me while a stranger

Wandering from the heart of God

And He to rescue me from danger

Used his own precious blood

Believing in God's goodness, as evidenced in his grace on the cross, really is the fetter that will keep us from wandering. But, this week, that is not my poem. I thought I would post another of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's about patience. In many situations the difficulty is that the patience is not for a sure end - that is, we have no guarantees that the patience will produce anything in particular. Yet we must let God bend our rebellious wills even so.

Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,

But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks

Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;

To do without, take tosses, and obey.

Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,

Nowhere. Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks

Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks

Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.

We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills

To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills

Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.

And where is he who more and more distils

Delicious kindness?—He is patient. Patience fills

His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.

Gerard Manley Hopkins