Sunday
Literature is filled with allusions to the story of Moses and the burning bush, often in poetry but sometimes in prose. Jim Casey in Grapes of Wrath describes himself as a former “burning busher,” and although he has lost the spirit, he has become a secular Moses. After government agents kill him, Tom Joad takes up his cause, a Joshua who will lead America out of depression-era capitalism into a promised land.
I also very much like André Gide’s rewriting to the Prodigal Son parable, which makes powerful use of the burning bush image. Although a short story, the son explaining his decision to his father often reads like a poem:
“I changed your gold into pleasures, your precepts into fantasies, my chastity into poetry, and my austerity into desires…”
“Think about the pure flame that Moses saw on the sacred bush. It was burning but did not consume.”
“I knew a love that consumed.”
“The love that I want to teach you refreshes. After a little time, what is left of it, my prodigal son?”
“The memory of these pleasures.”
“And the destitution that follows them.”
“In this destitution I felt closer to you, Father.”
“Was it necessary to experience misery to motivate you to return to me?”
“I do not know. I do not know. It was in the aridity of that desert that I loved my thirst the most.”
“Your misery made you better appreciate the price of riches.”
“No, not that! Do you not understand me, my father? My heart, emptied of everything, is filled with love. At the price of my possessions, I bought fervor.”
“Were you thus happy far away from me?”
“I never felt I was far from you.”
And further on:
Father, I told you, I never loved you so much as when I was in the desert.
In other words, this love burns brightest in the wilderness, when things are at their darkest. And unlike the things of this world, it is never consumed.
Last year I fell in love with the allusion found in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh. As she sees it, the burning bush joins the natural world and the world of the spirit whereas our society too often fails to see how they are intertwined:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries,
And daub their natural faces unaware
More and more, from the first similitude.
Today I share a sonnet by Malcolm Guite, who makes similar connections. In one of his Advent poems. he says that God becoming incarnate on Christmas day is prefigured by “the mysterious and awesome manifestations of God on the mountain in the sign of the burning bush.” He observes that, for early Christians, this bush, “full of the fire of God yet still itself and unconsumed,” was “a sign of the Lord Christ who would come, filled with God and yet in mortal flesh unconsumed.”
Guite adds,
The elemental power, glory, and beauty of fire – yes and its holy danger too – is one with the nature of God himself. The Spirit is not only God’s breath upon us, God’s living water pouring down into out hearts, it’s the fire of his energies, passion, love and desire, burning within us and lighting all around. This is what energised those fragile disciples in their cold, closed dispirited house. This is where we too may source our own energy and only by noticing and waiting on this Spirit of fire as Moses did, can we hear God’s voice and his will for us as Christians and as Church.
Guite prefaces his sonnet with a prayer:
O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extent
O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm
O Adonai
By Malcolm Guite
Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue,
Unseeable, you gave yourself away,
The Adonai, the Tetragramaton
Grew by a wayside in the light of day.O you who dared to be a tribal God,
To own a language, people and a place,
Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,
If so you might be met with face to face,
Come to us here, who would not find you there,
Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,
Who heard no more than thunder in the air,
Who marked the mere events and not the myth.
Touch the bare branches of our unbelief
And blaze again like fire in every leaf.
Guite explains that Adonai “touches on the ancient title of God himself, who was called Adonai, Lord, because his sacred name, the four letters known as ‘The Tetragramaton’ could not be uttered by unworthy human beings without blasphemy.” The Advent miracle is that “this unknowable, un-namable, utterly holy Lord, chose out of His own free will and out of love for us, to be known, to bear a name, and to meet us where we are.”
God touches the bare branches of our unbelief so that they “blaze again like fire in every leaf.”
Previous Posts about Moses and the Burning Bush
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Michael Lewis: Earth’s Crammed with Heaven (March 22, 2025)
Chaya Lester: Ask Not for Whom the Bush Burns (April 20, 2024)
Yakov Azriel: The Bush of Faith Resists the Flames (March 3, 2013)
Harvey Shapiro: Passover Originated in Poetic Vision (April 4, 2022)
D. H. Lawrence: A Conflagration of Green Fires (March 21, 2021)
John Steinbeck: The Joads and Steinbeck’s Lenten Message (Feb. 27, 2016)
Ahn Do-hyun: A Coal Poem for Attorney Woo (Oct. 2, 2022)
David Whyte, Mary Oliver: Running into the Fire (Jan. 18, 2025)
André Gide’s Prodigal Son: Feeling Closest to God in the Desert (March 5, 2016)
