Four Candles

Four Candles

Revelation by Robert Frost

We make ourselves a place apart

     Behind light words that tease and flout,

But oh, the agitated heart

     Till someone find us really out.

’Tis pity if the case require

     (Or so we say) that in the end

We speak the literal to inspire

     The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play

     At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away

     Must speak and tell us where they are.

Over the years, this Frost poem surfaces for me as it did this morning while I pondered what to write. Each of the phrases has spoken to me at different times. I don’t know what phrase will resonate with you today if at all. That is the great challenge in trying to communicate with one another. It takes work. It takes curiosity to clear a way through the muddle of language and emotion for what is real and true. It takes a will to want to know one another. But what happens if the will to try to understand wains? What happens when we are just too weary. Too misunderstood, too often. What happens when we give up trying to find one another and we all “hide too well away?”

The phrase in this poem that stood out for me today was “we speak the literal to inspire the understanding…” Our understanding needs to be inspired. We need to be inspired. We need to be relit. We need to be breathed into by the Spirit to resuscitate our will to care. Maybe Christ’s birth was God’s way of speaking compassion to us literally in human flesh so that we could see that our best hope is still within us and needs to be rekindled…like breathing gently on a dying ember.

Peace,

Deb