Spiritual Sunday
As Julia and I are in the process of transforming my parents’ house into our house, we’re looking for ways to highlight our pottery collection. Silver we can do without—two of my brothers are taking that—but fine pottery is a passion of mine. My mother owns a number of wonderful pieces by local potters, as do we, and we’re clearing space so that guests and visitors can enjoy the collection as well.
All of which makes me interested in one of today’s Old Testament readings. In 18:1-11, Jeremiah imagines God as a potter. Longfellow, meanwhile, may have this passage partly in mind in his poem “Song of the Potter.”
First, here’s Jeremiah describing God as an angry potter. Envisioning Israel as a vessel in process, Jeremiah says that God can mess up humanity the way He messes up a pot. “I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you,” Jeremiah’s God tells humanity:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.
Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it
And:
Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.
Presumably Israel will become a better pot if it listens to God.
Longfellow also imagines God as a potter, and at one point he seems to allude to today’s passage: “A touch can make, a touch can mar.” In the end, however, he is making another point: the rotating pot is like the great wheel of fortune or the cycle of life. Longfellow may also have in mind Ecclesiastes 3, the passage that begins, “To everything there is a season.” (“Turn, turn, turn,” I hear Pete Seeger singing.)
In this drama, the pot cannot demand an explanation from the potter since the ways of that potter—whether it is God or fate—are beyond our understanding. So just accept that it is of clay that we are made and it is to clay that we shall return.
Song of the Potter
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Turn, turn, my wheel! Turn round and round,
Without a pause, without a sound:
So spins the flying world away!
This clay, well mixed with marl and sand,
Follows the motion of my hand;
For some must follow, and some command,
Though all are made of clay!Turn, turn, my wheel! All things must change
To something new, to something strange;
Nothing that is can pause or stay;
The moon will wax, the moon will wane,
The mist and cloud will turn to rain,
The rain to mist and cloud again,
To-morrow be to-day.Turn, turn, my wheel! All life is brief;
What now is bud will soon be leaf,
What now is leaf will soon decay;
The wind blows east, the wind blows west;
The blue eggs in the robin’s nest
Will soon have wings and beak and breast,
And flutter and fly away.Turn, turn, my wheel! This earthen jar
A touch can make, a touch can mar;
And shall it to the Potter say,
What makest thou? Thou hast no hand?
As men who think to understand
A world by their Creator planned,
Who wiser is than they.Turn, turn, my wheel! ‘Tis nature’s plan
The child should grow into the man,
The man grow wrinkled, old, and gray;
In youth the heart exults and sings,
The pulses leap, the feet have wings;
In age the cricket chirps, and brings
The harvest home of day.Turn, turn, my wheel! The human race,
Of every tongue, of every place,
Caucasian, Coptic, or Malay,
All that inhabit this great earth,
Whatever be their rank or worth,
Are kindred and allied by birth,
And made of the same clay.Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun
At daybreak must at dark be done,
To-morrow will be another day;
To-morrow the hot furnace flame
Will search the heart and try the frame,
And stamp with honor or with shame
These vessels made of clay.Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon
The noon will be the afternoon,
Too soon to-day be yesterday;
Behind us in our path we cast
The broken potsherds of the past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
And trodden into clay.