Spiritual Sunday
Robert Francis’s “Nothing Is Far” is a gem, a poet attempting to capture the sense of wonder he feels in the presence of even the simplest of natural objects. While there is no grand epiphany such as one encounters in the Scriptures, he still senses more than meets the eye. A common stone can still reveal/ Something not stone, not seen, yet real,” he observes.
The poem reminds me Emily Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to church.” After describing her trip to the orchard, which functions as her church, Dickinson concludes, “So instead of getting to Heaven, at last –/I’m going, all along.” In other words, heaven is here at hand so don’t think of it as something towards which one journeys.
Similarly, don’t think that God is absent in a bird, a tree, a stone. Nothing was God that is not here.
Nothing Is Far
By Robert Francis
Though I have never caught the word
Of God from any calling bird,
I hear all that the ancients heard.
Though I have seen no deity
Enter or leave a twilit tree,
I see all that the seers see.
A common stone can still reveal
Something not stone, not seen, yet real.
What may a common stone conceal?
Nothing is far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here.
Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.
Here in the sun I sit alone
Between the known and the unknown.