“Poetry stands at the center of Christian living. We glorify God by noticing, comparing, and naming in sometimes startling ways. Unlike the eye of science, poetry sees the meanings that bind seemingly bare facts together. The poet sees the world in a grain of sand—the roar on the other side of the silence.”
~Suzanne Clark

Most people are familiar with Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven in which he compares God’s pursuit of a human soul to the hound’s pursuit of its quarry. In the following poem, Thompson writes of the immanence of God in Christ.

In No Strange Land

The kingdom of God is within you

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air–
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!–
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places–
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry–and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry–clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. May you see Him, hear Him at your own “clay-shuttered door” and never “miss the many-splendored thing” nor the sound of angel’s wing.