Grains of Fire

Sunday I read the following passage, part of a canticle by Thomas Merton in A Book of Hours, edited by Kathleen Deignan, and it resonated with the fiery light of sunlight flowers I encountered that morning.

    For, like a grain of fire
    Smouldering in the heart of every living essence
    God plants His undivided power--
    Buries His thought too vast for worlds
    In seed and root and blade and flower,

    Until, in the amazing shadowlights
    Surcharging the religious silence of the spring
    Creation finds the pressure of its everlasting secret
    Too terrible to bear.
   
    Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees
    Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament
    And our own souls within us flash,
        and shower us with light,
    While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited
    Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire.

    And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice,
    The deep united threeness printed in our deepest being,
    Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an intuition,
        turns within,
    And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness
        and oblivion
    And plunges after to discover flame.
                        Book of Hours, p 49 -50.