And Then Again Begin...

Matthew Arnold wrote a poem once called "Dover Beach."  It too, is on my list of favorites.  The last stanza is:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.


The poem is stunningly beautiful in its lyricism.  The lines:

Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin...
I suppose some would consider the poem as a whole rather depressing, and that could be true.  There is a sort of eternal hopelessness about the human condition, for which faithful love is the only remedy, as Matt points out.

Some people really can tap into that sense of the "ebb and flow of human misery."  Life itself is an ebb and flow of happiness and sadness and intimacy and remoteness and hurting and healing and breathing in and breathing out.

Still, I think it is true, in the sense that without Love, is there really any point to whatever our daily tasks are?

So, when I think about this poem, I think, what if Matt was talking to God?

I know I feel God's presence most acutely at night in my superdark back yard, counting stars and cuddling Roxy (who does not like curling up on rocks, go figure!) and there have been some particular times when I've sat on a rock in New Mexico somewhere along the Jemez Trail or on the shores of Lake Michigan (much like an ocean if you've never been there) or even just hanging out on the Newburgh Dam on the Ohio River where I grew up, watching the water and listening to the sounds the world makes when we stop to hear them, that I have had these wordless conversations, heart to heart, with the One who is faithful love itself.

...and we are here as on a darkling plain...  He is right here, with me -with US- in the confusion and fear and noisiness of the world in which we live.

Let us be true to one another.