“God spoke to me this morning.”

I looked up at Philip with a little grin.  I always save my best thoughts for those mellow moments at the end of the meal, when Caspian, having abandoned all hope of receiving anything from the table, has laid his head down on Philip’s foot with a sigh and the dishes in the sink have yet to be thought of.

“He did?”  Philip’s face was all animated interest in the soft glow of candlelight and he laid down his fork.  “In the Bible?”

“No—it was in a poem.”  I paused and lifted my eyebrows significantly.

“Is that so?”  He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms with a satisfied smile.  “And do I get to hear it?”

That was all I was waiting for, and he knew it.  I dashed into the kitchen where my journal sat waiting on the counter and dashed back again, as if afraid that the enchanted moment of communion would pass if the twilight deepened any more outside or the candles on the table burned a bit lower.  I read it out loud to him there in the waning, flickering light and could feel the joy throbbing in my voice, unabated since that morning’s first perusal of Yeats’ The Two Trees. 

When I was done Philip silently reached for my journal which I had laid on the table between us and read it slowly to himself.  When he finally looked up at me his face bore a reflection of my own joy, and a dawning awareness of what I had seen buried like a horde of fairie gold within the exquisite lines.

 
THE TWO TREES

by: William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

It has been said that for every look at self we must take ten looks at Christ. I find that truth expressed with such magnificent beauty in this poem. For while the accepted modern interpretation–and for all I know, the original intent–of these lines may uphold an inward search for goodness apart from Christ, as a Christian I take great delight in the freedom I have to search out the gleaming flashes of truth that glitter and sparkle with such inexorable joy in the world around me.  As C.S. Lewis recounted in Surprised by Joy, longings that disclose eternal realities may be mediated to us by ‘the water-colour world of Morris, the leafy recesses of Malory, the twilight of Yeats…’  That is just the wonder of poetry, or of anything beautiful, for that matter.  They bear the opportunity of communicating spiritual truth, these remnants of a lost Eden, and give us courage to hope in a Redemptive Plan that is steadily, patiently, unrelentingly working to restore all things to their original purpose. 

For what does the holy tree represent to me but Holy Desire, indeed, the Life from which all living springs?  As a believer I have the blessed opportunity to gaze into my own heart and see Jesus Christ.  That unspeakable reality jars me time and again from morbid introspection and self-centered cynicism. It reminds me that while ‘those who fain would serve Him best are conscious most of wrong within’, the consciousness of our very weaknesses is what ultimately propells us towards Him with a force that all the ‘natural virtues’ in the world together could never muster. And it silences those ‘ravens of unresting thought’, those ceaseless doubts and questions and inward deliberations, as if by some potent charm. When the home of our thoughts shifts from ‘who am I?’ to ‘Who is He?’ I believe we begin to fathom the miracle of ‘Christ in us, the hope of glory’.

The truth is that ‘anyone who is in Christ is a new creation: the old has gone; the new has come’. Throughout the Bible, God’s people are likened to thriving trees and fruitful gardens. He calls us ‘trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord’; He promises that if we abide in Him we’ll bear fruit that remains. I just love that image of His life in me being a indefatiguable green growing thing that even my obtuseness, my failures and sins, cannot destroy.

Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusts in Thee…