Excerpt from “Hymn for the Mercy Seat”
 |
| (Found here) |
The eyes of faith, too, unbelieving in the strangeness,
Looking on him who makes all being gift,
Whose overflowing holds, sustains,
Who sets what is in shape.
Here in the cradle, swaddled, homeless,
And here adored by the bright eyes of angels,
The great Lord recognised.
. . .
Soul, look. This is the place where all kings’ monarch
Rested a corpse, the maker of our rest, and in
His stillness all things always move,
Within his buried silence.
Song for the lost. and life: wonder
For angels’ straining eyes, God’s flesh.
They praise together, they adore.
‘To him’, they shout, ‘only to him’.
And I, while there is breath left to me,
Say, Thanksgiving, with a hundred thousand words,
Thanksgiving: that there is a God to worship,
There is an everlasting matter for my singing:
Who with the worst of us, in what
He shares with me, cried under tempting.
A child and powerless, the boundless
Living true God,
Flesh rots: instead, aflame, along with heaven’s singers.
I shall pierce through the veil, into the land
Of infinite astonishment, the land
Of what was done at Calvary:
I shall look on what never can be seen. and still
Shall live. look on the one who died and who still lives
And shall; look in eternal jointure and communion.
Not to be parted.
. . .
~Rowan Williams
Comments