When Light Penetrates The Fog Of Fear And Darkness
When Light through the keyhole penetrates the malaise
And within that moment your soul gives sincere praise
For that divine gift that Life's sweet promise resets
Earth's clock to those times before this darkness beset
Know Truth and eternal Light never mankind fails
To conquer anything issued from pits of Hell.
Darkness fears not man but rather eternal Light.
On earth, we are in midst of that eternal fight.
When Light through the keyhole penetrates blackest Dark
And waking soul finds that Life is not just a lark
Path is made to from within the black walk away
Leave blinded fold and in earnest begin to pray.
World parades its great evils as the one true way
And sets foundation for man's greed to hold deepest sway.
Darkness fears not man but rather eternal Light.
On earth, we are in midst of that eternal fight.
When Light through the keyhole penetrates our sorrows
And we feel true fright and fear for our tomorrows
Truth reveals Light banishes that deep wicked fear
As echoes of paradise draws ever more near
Know eternal Light, Truth and Time is on our side
In that promise, certainty of man's saving tides.
Darkness fears not man but rather eternal Light.
On earth, we are in midst of that eternal fight.
Robert J. Lindley, 4-07-2020
Rhyme, ( When Eyes Are Opened To The Blessings Of True Light )
Syllables Per Line:
00 12 -(Title)
0 12 12 12 12 12 12 0 12 12
0 12 12 12 12 12 12 0 12 12
0 12 12 12 12 12 12 0 12 12
Total # Syllables: 300
Total # Words::::::224
Note: This is a revamping of an older poem.
One written four decades ago when I was a
mere twenty-six years old and then faced
a time of darkest dark in my life. I have
revamped it to modern times to address
this dark plague that the world faces now
and to yet again point out that the eternal
truth that mankind has a great purpose
than out time here on earth is a mere blink
of the eye. And nothing, nothing, nothing
can ever even come closeto defeating that
our fated destiny.
Death and Darkness are only temporary,
while Light and Divine Promise is Eternal.
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(1.)
http://inters.org/lumen-fidei-francis
The theological meaning of Light according to Lumen Fidei
The encyclical Lumen Fidei is the first document of Pope Francis’ pontificate. We suggest that our readers review numbers 1-4 (see below), which summarize the symbolism of light in reference to faith, as they appear in Sacred Scripture and are discussed in the patristic and theological Tradition (for interested visitors: the complete text is available on the Holy See web site). These paragraphs offer a short historical account of the evolution of the conception of faith as “light”, ranging from the novelty brought by Christianity in the pagan Roman world to modern thought’s critique of it, and conclude by affirming the value of the light of faith not only for Christians, but also for every man and woman.
1. The light of Faith: this is how the Church’s tradition speaks of the great gift brought by Jesus. In John’s Gospel, Christ says of himself: "I have come as light into the world, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness" (Jn 12:46). Saint Paul uses the same image: "God who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts" (2 Cor 4:6). The pagan world, which hungered for light, had seen the growth of the cult of the sun god, Sol Invictus, invoked each day at sunrise. Yet though the sun was born anew each morning, it was clearly incapable of casting its light on all of human existence. The sun does not illumine all reality; its rays cannot penetrate to the shadow of death, the place where men’s eyes are closed to its light. "No one — Saint Justin Martyr writes — has ever been ready to die for his faith in the sun".[1] Conscious of the immense horizon which their faith opened before them, Christians invoked Jesus as the true sun "whose rays bestow life". [2] To Martha, weeping for the death of her brother Lazarus, Jesus said: "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" (Jn 11:40). Those who believe, see; they see with a light that illumines their entire journey, for it comes from the risen Christ, the morning star which never sets.
2. Yet in speaking of the light of faith, we can almost hear the objections of many of our contemporaries. In modernity, that light might have been considered sufficient for societies of old, but was felt to be of no use for new times, for a humanity come of age, proud of its rationality and anxious to explore the future in novel ways. Faith thus appeared to some as an illusory light, preventing mankind from boldly setting out in quest of knowledge. The young Nietzsche encouraged his sister Elisabeth to take risks, to tread "new paths… with all the uncertainty of one who must find his own way", adding that "this is where humanity’s paths part: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to be a follower of truth, then seek".[3] Belief would be incompatible with seeking. From this starting point Nietzsche was to develop his critique of Christianity for diminishing the full meaning of human existence and stripping life of novelty and adventure. Faith would thus be the illusion of light, an illusion which blocks the path of a liberated humanity to its future.
3. In the process, faith came to be associated with darkness. There were those who tried to save faith by making room for it alongside the light of reason. Such room would open up wherever the light of reason could not penetrate, wherever certainty was no longer possible. Faith was thus understood either as a leap in the dark, to be taken in the absence of light, driven by blind emotion, or as a subjective light, capable perhaps of warming the heart and bringing personal consolation, but not something which could be proposed to others as an objective and shared light which points the way. Slowly but surely, however, it would become evident that the light of autonomous reason is not enough to illumine the future; ultimately the future remains shadowy and fraught with fear of the unknown. As a result, humanity renounced the search for a great light, Truth itself, in order to be content with smaller lights which illumine the fleeting moment yet prove incapable of showing the way. Yet in the absence of light everything becomes confused; it is impossible to tell good from evil, or the road to our destination from other roads which take us in endless circles, going nowhere.
4. There is an urgent need, then, to see once again that faith is a light, for once the flame of faith dies out, all other lights begin to dim. The light of faith is unique, since it is capable of illuminating every aspect of human existence. A light this powerful cannot come from ourselves but from a more primordial source: in a word, it must come from God. Faith is born of an encounter with the living God who calls us and reveals his love, a love which precedes us and upon which we can lean for security and for building our lives. Transformed by this love, we gain fresh vision, new eyes to see; we realize that it contains a great promise of fulfilment, and that a vision of the future opens up before us. Faith, received from God as a supernatural gift, becomes a light for our way, guiding our journey through time. On the one hand, it is a light coming from the past, the light of the foundational memory of the life of Jesus which revealed his perfectly trustworthy love, a love capable of triumphing over death. Yet since Christ has risen and draws us beyond death, faith is also a light coming from the future and opening before us vast horizons which guide us beyond our isolated selves towards the breadth of communion. We come to see that faith does not dwell in shadow and gloom; it is a light for our darkness. Dante, in the Divine Comedy, after professing his faith to Saint Peter, describes that light as a "spark, which then becomes a burning flame and like a heavenly star within me glimmers".[4] It is this light of faith that I would now like to consider, so that it can grow and enlighten the present, becoming a star to brighten the horizon of our journey at a time when mankind is particularly in need of light.
from Franciscus, Encyclical Lumen Fidei, 2013, June 29, nn. 1-4.
[1] Dialogus cum Tryphone Iudaeo, 121, 2: PG 6, 758.
[2] Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, IX: PG 8, 195.
[3] Brief an Elisabeth Nietzsche (11 June 1865), in: Werke in drei Bänden, München, 1954, 953ff.
[4] Paradiso XXIV, 145-147.
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(2.)
https://interestingliterature.com/2017/07/10-of-the-best-religious-poems-in-english-literature/
LITERATURE
10 of the Best Religious Poems in English Literature
The best religious poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
What are the best religious poems in English literature? Obviously religious faith – and, indeed, religious doubt – has loomed large in English poetry, whether it’s in the devotional lyrics of John Donne and George Herbert or the modern, secular musings of Philip Larkin in ‘Church Going’. We’ve excluded longer works such as John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, although naturally that’s a must-read work of English religious poetry, just conceived on a different scale from what we have here.
Caedmon, Hymn. Perhaps the oldest poem written in English, Caedmon’s Hymn was composed in the 7th century by a goatherd and takes the form of a short hymn in praise of God. It was Bede, or ‘the Venerable Bede’ as he is often known, who ensured the survival of Caedmon’s Hymn, when he jotted it down in Latin translation in one of his books. An anonymous scribe then added the Anglo-Saxon form of the hymn in the margins of Bede’s book.
William Dunbar, ‘Done is a battell on the dragon blak’. This poem, by the medieval Scottish poet William Dunbar (c. 1465-c. 1530), boasts one of the finest opening lines in all medieval poetry. The rest of the poem is pretty good, too. It takes as its theme the Resurrection, and casts Christ as a crusading knight, so it’s a hugely exciting piece of sacred poetry.
John Donne, ‘A Hymn to God the Father’. We could easily have chosen one of Donne’s celebrated Holy Sonnets here, but his ‘Hymn to God the Father’ offers something nicely representative of Donne’s style in his best religious verse. Donne is not aiming to sing God’s praises uncritically: rather, he wishes to ask God about sin and forgiveness, among other things. The to-and-fro of the poem’s rhyme schemes, where its stanzas are rhymed ababab, reinforces this idea of question-and-answer. The poem is a sort of confessional, containing Donne’s trademark directness and honesty, and sees him seeking forgiveness from God for his sins, while also confessing that he will continue to sin (he cannot help it) and that he fears death – another sin to add to the list. Donne then seeks reassurance from God that he will be forgiven and will reach Heaven.
George Herbert, ‘The Collar’. George Herbert (1593-1633) is one of the greatest devotional poets in the English language, and ‘The Collar’ one of his finest poems. Herbert’s speaker seeks to reject belief in God, to cast off his ‘collar’ and be free. (The collar refers specifically to the ‘dog collar’ that denotes a Christian priest, with its connotations of ownership and restricted freedom, though it also suggests being bound or restricted more generally. Herbert, we should add, was a priest himself.) However, as he rants and raves, the speaker comes to realise that God appears to be calling him – and the speaker duly and dutifully replies, the implication being that he has recovered his faith and is happy to bear the ‘collar’ of faith again.
Henry Vaughan, ‘They Are All Gone into the World of Light’. The Welsh metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1621-95) is best known for his 1650 collection, Silex Scintillans (‘Sparks from the Flint’), which established him as one of the great devotional poets in English literature. ‘They Are All Gone into the World of Light’ is about death, God, and the afterlife, and the poet’s desire to pass over into the next life – the ‘World of Light’ – to join those whom he has lost.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam. ‘There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds’. These lines from this long 1850 elegy for Tennyson’s friend – perhaps his finest achievement – strike to the core of the greatness of Tennyson’s poem, which, as T. S. Eliot said, was a great religious poem not because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt. By the end of this long cycle of moving poems, Tennyson has conquered his doubts and his faith in God has been restored.
Christina Rossetti, ‘Good Friday’. This poem was published in Christina Rossetti’s 1866 collection The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. The poem is about Rossetti’s struggle to feel close to Christ and the teachings of Christianity, and to weep for the sacrifice he made. Like Tennyson’s In Memoriam above, the poem reflects many Victorians’ difficulties in reconciling Christianity with the new worldview influenced by recent philosophy and scientific discoveries.
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Oxen’. Sometimes a great sacred poem is written by a poet who is not himself religious, and such as the case with ‘The Oxen’. Written in 1915 during WWI, this poem shows a yearning for childhood beliefs which the adult speaker can no longer hold. In other words, it highlights the yearning to believe, even – or perhaps especially – when we know that we cannot bring ourselves to entertain such beliefs. (Hardy had lost his religious faith early in life.)
T. S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday. The first long poem Eliot composed after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, the six-part sequence Ash-Wednesday is about Eliot’s struggle to cleanse and purify himself so that he might be renewed and find deeper spiritual fulfilment. Using Dantean and Biblical tropes of stairwells, gardens, and bones being picked apart by leopards, the poem is at times frustratingly abstract (there is lots of wordplay around ‘the Word’, i.e. the Word of God) and at other times, marvellously vivid. Ash-Wednesday is the great modernist religious poem in English.
Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’. A meditation on the role of the church in a secular age, written by a poet who described himself as an ‘Anglican agnostic’, ‘Church Going’ is one of Larkin’s most popular poems from The Less Deceived. In the poem, the speaker of the poem visits a church on one of his bicycle rides and stops to have a look inside – though he isn’t sure why he stopped. The title carries a double meaning: both going to church (if only to look around, rather than to worship there), and the going or disappearing of churches, and the Church, from British life.
For more classic poetry, see our pick of the best poems about heaven. If you’re in search of a good poetry collection, we recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market.
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.