Nicolas Bernard Lepicie, “Conversion of St. Paul”
Spiritual Sunday
In an allusion to one of today’s Gospel readings, William Cowper in Part V of The Task (“The Winter Morning Walk,” 1785) uses Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus to capture the spiritual power of natural beauty. Given how rough winds and even snow are shaking parts of the United States at the moment, Cowper’s poem is unexpectedly seasonal.
After describing the beauties of a winter’s walk, Cowper a contrast between merely observing nature vs. detecting God’s hand in it. If we don’t acknowledge a divine presence, he says, we are as blind as the animals that do no more than “ruminate heedless of the scene outspread”:
Acquaint thyself with God, if thou wouldst taste
His works. Admitted once to his embrace,
Thou shalt perceive that thou wast blind before;
Thine eye shall be instructed; and thine heart,
Made pure, shall relish, with divine delight
Till then unfelt, what hands divine have wrought.
Brutes graze the mountain-top, with faces prone,
And eyes intent upon the scanty herb
It yields them; or, recumbent on its brow,
Ruminate heedless of the scene outspread
Beneath, beyond, and stretching far away
From inland regions to the distant main.
Man views it, and admires; but rests content
With what he views. The landscape has his praise,
But not its Author…
Cowper invokes Paul to describe what the intense joy he suddenly experiences:
Then liberty, like day,
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from heaven
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.
A voice is heard that mortal ears hear not,
Till thou hast touch’d them; ‘tis the voice of song,
A loud Hosanna sent from all thy works;
Which he that hears it with a shout repeats,
And adds his rapture to the general praise.
In that blest moment Nature, throwing wide
Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile
The Author of her beauties…
I suspect that you too have sent up loud Hosannas in the presence of a gorgeous day. Or something comparable.