Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Sunday
As political chaos appears to be the order of the day, causing Americans like me to experience deep feelings of dread, it is comforting to turn to a poem like Henry Vaughan’s “My Soul, There Is a Country.” Written during times yet more turbulent than our own—England was in the grip of a civil war—the poet assures us that there exists a realm of “sweet peace” far beyond “noise and danger.”
When we are feeling powerless and dispirited, we can choose to focus on Jesus’s vision of “pure love.” This love will guard us like “a winged sentry,” Vaughan writes, drawing an image from the war he was witnessing. “The rose that cannot wither,” he continues on, provides us with a fortress and a place of rest.
Perhaps the rose is the celestial rose of Dante’s Paradiso, the “Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” The poem is a wake-up call to our own souls.
My Soul, There Is a Country, 1650
By Henry Vaughan
My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
All skillful in the wars:
There, above noise and danger
Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles
And One, born in a manger
Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious friend
And, O my soul, awake!
Did in pure love descend
To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flow’r of Peace,
The Rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges,
For none can thee secure
But One who never changes,
Thy God, thy life, thy cure.
