Meynell: His planet

Friday, August 9, 2019
    Feast of Mary Sumner, Founder of the Mothers’ Union, 1921
Meditation:
    How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!”
    —Isaiah 52:7 (NIV)
Quotation:
CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE

    With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

    But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How he administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race has kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.

    Of his earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of his way with us.

    No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as its chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

    Nor, in our little day,
May his devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way
Or his bestowal there be manifest.

    But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

    O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.
    ... Alice Meynell (1847-1922), Collected Poems of Alice Meynell, London: Burns & Oates, 1913, p. 58 (see the book)
    See also Isa. 52:7; Job 26:14; Ps. 40:5; 92:5; 139:1-6; Eph. 1:7-8; 2:6-7; Col. 1:27; 2:2-3
Quiet time reflection:
    Lord, wherever I may go, You reign supreme.

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