Fear Not, It Is I

Lord, purge our eyes to see
within the seed a tree,
within the glowing egg a bird,
within the shroud a butterfly:
till taught by such, we see
beyond all creatures, thee,
and hearken for thy tender word,
and hear it, ‘Fear not: it is I.’

~ Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

It’s that time of year: the slog of January and February is upon us. After Advent and Christmas, we leave behind the seasons of excitement and anticipation for a season often filled with circulating sickness, cloudy grey skies, and general dreariness. No longer do we have some grand holiday to wait for; no longer do we have special songs to sing or holiday practices to observe.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this general dreariness felt more clearly than in a school, especially in the lower grades. One sees it on the faces of the children on the first day back after Christmas break: the children appear burdened and weary, even after a season of rest. We teachers, too, are weary. And I’m sure the parents feel the same weariness at home. What to do with such dreariness, such mundanity?

Our cultural moment, it has often been noted, is one not merely of dreariness but also of acerbity. Our institutions are ideological battlegrounds; our homes are often likewise grounds of division. Even churches – the houses of God on earth – frequently brim with bitter conflicts and scandals, whether such scandals are made public on the Internet or kept within the boundaries of the community. 

Christians should not be surprised by the dreariness and acerbity of our world. The writers of the New Testament epistles remind us that we live in a spiritually beleaguered world – we fight against “powers and principalities,” in Paul’s words. The Christian ought to recognize his place “in the world but not of it,” as the familiar phrase runs – an idea which draws on Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in John 17. Jesus prays to his Father: “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.” Though sent into the world, Christ’s people are not “of” it. We have a heavenly heritage, a heavenly home.

And yet, to paraphrase the words of Wendell Berry in his novel Jayber Crow, our heavenly home is one that floats among us even now, on earth. We glimpse it through worship, through the Word, through the sacraments, through fellowship. We glimpse heaven even among the things of creation: this, at least, seems to be the assumption of the Biblical writers, from David to Luke to Paul and Peter, who use agricultural metaphors to mirror spiritual realities. “Consider the lilies of the field,” Christ says, regarding his Father’s provision. “You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies,” Paul says, regarding resurrection.

Even amid the darkness of our world, we who claim a heavenly heritage in Christ live even now in light. Things unseen flicker behind what we do see. The eyes of hope may behold future blessings in the midst of the present. This is, I think, part of what Christina Rosetti is getting at in the above poem. We who are Christ’s live in a spiritual beleaguered world, and yet we lead lives that signify the heavenly kingdom already present.

We must ask, as Rossetti does, for purged eyes. Rosetti’s plea “Lord, purge my eyes to see” recalls to mind Isaiah, a man of “unclean lips” whose lips are purged by a touch of an angel. Only a divinely-touched nature can behold the unseen realities of hope – a tree in a seed, a bird in an egg.

Rossetti’s poem images for us the plea for sight, a plea similar to many made of Jesus in the gospels: the blind man’s “Rabbi, let me recover my sight,” and the doubtful man’s, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!” Yet Rossetti’s poem is not only an image of the faith that pleads to God for sight. It is also a practice in sacramental imagination.

Essays that speak of this “sacramental imagination” sometimes strike me as slippery and unclear. A sacramental imagination regards the things of this world as images, signs, symbols pointing beyond themselves to God and his order. To clarify, the sacramental imagination does not literally equate tree, bird, and butterfly with the presence of God. Rather, the idea of the sacramental imagination has to do with seeing the world, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins famously wrote, “charged with the grandeur of God.”

Hans Boersma has written at length of this way of the thinking, an ancient way of imagining the world:

Throughout the Great Tradition, when people spoke of the mysterious quality of the created order, what they meant was that this created order—along with all other temporary and provisional gifts of God—was a sacrament. This sacrament was the sign of a mystery that, though present in the created order, nonetheless far transcended human comprehension. The sacramental character of reality was the reason it so often appeared mysterious and beyond human comprehension.

The medievals especially understood that the created order pointed to its Creator. Elsewhere Boersma describes this further: the created order serves as a “material gift from God in and through which we enter into the joy of his heavenly presence.” Our Creator is present through and in his creation, although in a different way than he is present in his church and the sacraments of the church.

Rossetti enacts a sacramental way of regarding the world when she asks to be “taught by such” – such things as trees, birds, and butterflies. When we learn to see with the eyes of hope – hope for a tree even when looking at a mere seed – we learn to see the Lord when looking at his mere creatures. If we begin to regard the world in the way that Rossetti does, we will likewise begin to “hearken for thy tender word.” Rossetti’s example ought to be an encouragement to souls wearied by the air of dreariness we so often breathe.

Rossetti’s eyes of hope are especially encouraging to me, as a teacher. Much of the work of training up children in the way they should go is the work of patience and hope. Planting seeds and watering them, and trusting that there is indeed a tree within the seed that waits to bloom – this is the call of the Christian teacher, just as it is of any Christian. We must trust that the true gardener will bring trees from the seeds we tend, whether our work involves students, our own children, or our neighbors. And we must prepare ourselves to hear the words of the risen Lord: “Fear not, it is I.”

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