‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,’ wrote D.H. Lawrence in the poem ‘The Hands of God’. He went on: ‘But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.’ We wonder. We wonder how this came to be written. We wonder, too, about the fearful thing.
Like a dog with a bone, Lawrence could not let go of the Christian faith. Like a great many other writers, he thought of God in anthropomorphic terms. God has a strong right arm. His eyes see everything. He walks, runs and flies. Whether we think of him every other moment, or hardly at all, we usually think in terms we understand of humans.
We do not choose to fall. That does not mean we have no choice. We choose. And the choice lies between the good and the bad. But it is not all our doing. Something precipitates the fall – maybe our childhood, maybe our peer group, maybe our reading. Lawrence looks into the depth. As with vertigo, we are drawn to descend. The height is our friend from which we gain a vista and an opponent that betrays us.
A sense of the presence of God is a mysterious visitation. It can be fabricated or be a mere label. It can take the form of an attachment to one of the great religions. It can be a poor little reflection of what might have been. It may take the form of words. It may not.
We can hardly say that at every stage in our life we know what it is to be in the hands of God or to be elsewhere. Often we live by fits and starts. We blow hot and cold. We are confident about finding meaning in the passing days – and a day passes. We are all at sixes and sevens with ourselves. When men and women talk about the living God, we move into shifting territory. It is an undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns. Yet there is a chink of light. The New Testament encourages us to think in that light.
Human nature? It’s much like the weather, fine and bright, dull and gloomy. We find ourselves at the mercy of our moods. We know so little of ourselves.
Lawrence ends the poem: ‘Let me never know myself apart from the living God.’
ROSSETTI’S PLEA
‘God strengthen me to bear myself,’ wrote Christina Rossetti. She was aware of her own weaknesses (‘This coward with pathetic voice’) and concluded that there was one who could help her curb herself, ‘Break off the yoke and set me free.’
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