sent in by Dr. Roger Thurling
"Christ in the Universe"
With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.
But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord¿s entrusted Word.
Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.
No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.
But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.
-- Alice Meynell
As a convinced atheist of many years I had often wondered how Christians
reconciled their belief in an all-knowing all-powerful universe-wide God,
with what they believed to be its (his?) interest in, and manifestation in
our parochial little planet, with all its peculiarities of biology and
geography - almost all of them unlikely to be repeated anywhere else in the
universe.
Alice Meynell tackled this problem head-on, walking over it as though it
didn't exist.
Roger
[Links]
Biography:
Alice Meynell (1847 - 1922), English writer, editor, critic, and
suffragist, now remembered mainly as a poet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Meynell