Words of Light and Hope from Jane McLarty (LLM)

Words of Light and Hope by Jane McLarty

Easter hope is more important than ever at times like these. The news is so full of disaster we feel we cannot bear to helplessly read or watch the same human pain unfolding again and again. In our communities we or people we know are faced with bereavement or illness or other difficulties known only to God. Even the weather with its incessant rain seems to reflect the mood of the times.
But Easter says to us that out of the blackest despair God can bring new life and new hope. We may, indeed we will, still have to face hardship, sadness and loss; but Easter says that this is not how the story ultimately ends. The God who ‘first loved us’ (1 Jn 4:19) is constantly working in the world to bring transformation, and our world even now as Gerard Manley Hopkins said is ‘charged with the grandeur of God’. Oddly, it is often in the tiny everyday things that we might notice this: seeing the minute blue stripes on the speedwell petal; the russet corners of the partridge tail as the flock scatters in flight from the roadside. What moments of joy can you find in your day? All are a foretaste of the joy to come, where all our stories end – as imagined in this poem.

And that will be heaven                                      Evangeline Paterson
and that will be heaven
and that will be heaven
at last the first unclouded
seeing
to stand like the sunflower
turned full face to the sun drenched
with light in the still centre
held while the circling planets
hum with an utter joy
seeing and knowing
at last in every particle
seen and known and not turning
away
never turning away
again