Worship & Wonder 11: Fulifilment

I have no wit, no words, no tears; 

My heart within me like a stone 

Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears; 

Look right, look left, I dwell alone; 

I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief 

No everlasting hills I see; 

My life is in the falling leaf: 

O Jesus, quicken me. 

My life is like a faded leaf, 

My harvest dwindled to a husk: 

Truly my life is void and brief 

And tedious in the barren dusk; 

My life is like a frozen thing, 

No bud nor greenness can I see: 

Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring; 

O Jesus, rise in me. 

My life is like a broken bowl, 

A broken bowl that cannot hold 

One drop of water for my soul 

Or cordial in the searching cold; 

Cast in the fire the perish'd thing; 

Melt and remould it, till it be 

A royal cup for Him, my King: 

O Jesus, drink of me.

‘A Better Resurrection’

Christina Rossetti

This poem resonates particularly strongly with me, since the depression has been especially severe this Lent.  I cannot yet tell why it has reemerged so strongly at this time (‘I have no wit, no words, no tears’ to analyse or even describe it), but Rossetti’s insight onto her own life being ‘a frozen thing’ echoes my own. Her parched, numbed soul being like a ‘broken bowl’ is an experience anyone who has known the dark places will remember.

In her poem ‘Introspection’ Rossetti wrote of suffering ‘the shattering ruining blow’ of ‘terrible pain’:

My soul broke but was not bent;

Up I stand like a blasted tree

By the shore of the shivering sea.

On my boughs neither leaf nor fruit,

No sap in my uttermost root,

Brooding in an anguish dumb

On the short past and the long to come.

Her ability to describe the deep unhappiness of the break up of a love affair, and the depression that threatened throughout her life due to poor health, is compelling.

But for Rossetti, such pain always has to set in the context of her faith.  ‘A better resurrection’ refers to Hebrews 11, St Paul’s great peroration on the ‘cloud of witnesses’, the Christian heroes of faith, whose example of undergoing all forms of suffering, even through torture and death, demonstrates their faith that their lives might show glory to God.  St Paul defines faith as being ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen … By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible. (Hebrews 11.1,3).

It is Rossetti’s faith that places that ‘yet’ at the heart of the poem, a structural poetic turning point, but also a faith statement of hope: ‘rise it shall’, resurrection, rebirth, regrowth, healing, are by this ‘yet’ declared possible by the intervention of Christ.

My ‘sap’, my life of the Spirit: ’rise it shall’.  Grief, misery, numbness, brokenness, frozenness, failings and fallings - even death itself - the faintest sliver of faith tells me that none of these are the end.  Rossetti’s prayer is that, by the power of Christ, she will be quickened, and so transformed, that her life will become a sacred vessel; her life will be sacrament, lifted to the glory of God.

Glory comes out of my worship because of, not in spite of, my brokenness.  

Remember, o my soul: ’Rise it shall’.

rise it shall. Canon 7d. f8. 1/500. ISO 100.