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Sunday
Today’s Old Testament reading recounts Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. Elizabeth Barrett Browning makes wonderful use of the episode in Book 7 of her long narrative poem Aurora Leigh.
To set you up for it, here’s the passage from Exodus:
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Following this initial encounter, God proceeds to instruct Moses about his exodus mission.
Aurora Leigh is a young woman’s first-person account of her life, including her writing endeavors. In the book she is writing, she is determined to capture truth, which is that the natural world is infused with God’s spirit. The artist who separates nature from spirit, she says,
Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,
Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse,
Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men,
Is wrong, in short, at all points.
Then, in a passage that blows me away, she invokes Moses’s burning bush:
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.
Then, to again punctuate art’s purpose,
Art’s the witness of what Is
Behind this show.
For another artistic rendition of the burning bush episode, here’s a poem by one Michael Lewis that appeared in Modern Reformation. He too reveals “what Is behind the snow” as he charts Moses’s path from “majestic Pharaoh” to the far more powerful beauty of God:
Sestina of the Burning Bush
By Michael Lewis
The sun is high, the land brilliant and beautiful
this morning as I tend the flock, the whole
camp behind me, the land before, the burning
heat upon me. The sheep are grazing, and awful
thoughts consume me; thoughts of the glory
I left behind, of the majesty
of the city I grew up in. The majestic
Pharaoh looms large in my mind: his beauty,
his power, his knowledge, his glory.
And now my thoughts turn to another, the whole
event drowning me, and the awful reality of his death, and my soul burns
in agony. The pain is short as a light burns
my eyes; the light is distant, but majestic,
and though the flame wavers, an awful
feeling rises from within. The beauty
of the light draws me forward, and I am wholly
enchanted by its purity, by its glory.
Thoughts of my past filter away in the glory
of the bush, a fire within but not burning
and not consumed. This must be holy
ground. A voice from within the bush, majestic
and great, calls my name, “Moses,” and the beauty
overwhelms me. “Moses,” the voice, awful
and tender, calls me forward, to the awe-filled
presence of the flame. “This is my glory,
this is what you have longed for, my beauty.”
I press onward, toward the flame, the burning
bush that speaks my name, and the majesty
which I yearn for. “Moses, this is holy
ground, take off your sandals; for I am holy.”
My bare feet are against the awful
heat from the flame of the bush of the majesty
of the Lord. I look behind me, to the glory
surrounding me, all from the burning
bush, resplendent in all God’s beauty.
“Moses, I am holy,” the glory
speaks, and the awful presence of the burning
bush is replaced with majesty, and His beauty.
