Text
and art by I. Lilias Trotter
There came such a lovely sense... of
what it means to be "buried with Christ" -
not only dead but buried - "put to silence in
the grave" - "I can" and "I
can't" put to silence side by side - the lovely
silence and stillness of "a grave beside
Him" with God's seal on the stone and His watch
set, that nothing but the risen life of Jesus may
come forth.
"Give me a death in which there
shall be no life, and a life in which there shall be
no death" - That was a prayer of the Arab saint,
Abed-El-Kader - I came upon it again the other day -
is it not wonderful?
And all nature here is full of such
intense quietness, these autumn days. A solemn
quietness, with the sense of the spring behind it,
like Easter eve - the dear living things are going
into their graves - and one sees how the grave is a
must-be. "Fall into the ground and die" -
not upon it. The road outside our lodging is strewn
with acorns that will never come to anything because
they are just lying on the ground, not in it.
"Fall into" - not "struggle
into."
Two glad services are ours
Both the Master loves to bless
First we serve with all our powers
Then with all our helplessness.
These lines of Charles Fox have rung
in my head this last fortnight - and they link on
with the wonderful words "weak with Him" -
for the world's salvation was not wrought out by the
three years in which He went about doing good, but in
the three hours of darkness in which He hung stripped
and nailed, in utter exhaustion of spirit, soul and
body, till His heart broke. So little wonder for us,
if the price of power is weakness.
God needs that helplessness as truly
as the negative pole is needed to complete the
electric circuit and set free the power. And so when
one can only lie like sort of a log, unable even to
frame the prayers one would like to pray, His Spirit
will find the way through that lowest point which He
so strangely needs, and lift them up to the Throne.
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