He feels a universe away from me, but how his children circled me with prayer that day in Fleet. Before I drove away to an uncertain future, they were there. His full acceptance is a foreign thought, but someone’s held my hands, looked in my eyes, told me I’ll make mistakes, that it’s okay, and I’ve felt safe and valued deep inside. I cannot sense his welcome or his smile but I have seen my brother’s face light up to greet me and have rested in his hold content in loving and in being loved. Christ to me, that’s what all these have been: the word made flesh, God’s love in human skin.
Emmanuel might mean “God with us”, but there doesn’t always seem a lot of with-ness, does there? There is a book on my bookcase called Enduring Divine Absence, which is what it seems we get left having to deal with a lot of the time. It doesn’t seem like God is here and if he’s not here then it probably means he doesn’t care.
But even when I’ve felt starved of his presence, his love, I have felt love and welcome and acceptance from others. Their love is a mirror of God’s love (to steal a phrase from the conversation that inspired this poem), but it’s also that love itself, embodied. Christ plays in ten thousand places, as Hopkins wrote in the poem I borrowed my title from, and the kind eyes and smile and voice and hands of those who love me are also his.
Thank you for these good words.