Picking blackberries

Friday, Apr. 29, 2016

“Earth’s crammed with heaven/And every common bush afire with God;/But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,/The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

These lines reflect exactly how I feel, so I wish I could claim credit for writing them. The author, however, is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whom I dismissed irrelevant after being required in high school to read “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

My reintroduction to her poetry comes thanks to Bill McGarvey’s article in the March 7 “America” magazine, which referenced the above stanza. 

Most often I’m with the group that’s just sitting around, never noticing that oh, by the way, God’s here! Not only is he here, but he’s announced his presence with a burning bush! But hey, who cares about that when there’s all this delicious fruit to stuff into our mouths?

Reflecting on the poem, I realized with amazement that while God may be disappointed that we don’t notice the flames, he doesn’t scorch us with them to get our attention; instead, he accepts our blindness and in his goodness he provides us with earthly nourishment.

This probably never would have occurred to me, except for the poem. It is the mark of a great artist that he or she can take what the rest of us consider an unremarkable scene, and shift the focus so that we stop and stare and exclaim, “I never saw it that way before!’  

I read the Barrett Browning verse on Tuesday night, and Wednesday I got to see the bush afire.

It was one of those mornings where everything had to go just exactly right in order to get everything done that needed to be accomplished: I had to be in South Jordan at 6:30 a.m., then in Ogden by 7:30 a.m., back in South Jordan by 10, and into the office in Salt Lake City before noon.

As I got into the car, I muttered a quick prayer, which I repeated when I heard the news that traffic was slow at the I-15 Hill Air Force Base exit.

I confess that rather than putting my trust in God I said a few four-letter words getting from South Jordan onto the freeway, because I’m not familiar enough with the area to know until it was too late to merge that the long line of traffic in the right-hand lane on 4700 South was actually where I needed to be to get onto the belt route. Which meant I had to go east, through construction, to get to I-15. 

All the while, the clock was ticking.

Nevertheless, once I got onto the freeway, it was clear sailing to Ogden, where I arrived just as the Dream Builder’s Breakfast began.

The return trip was just as easy.

Now, the skeptic will say that traffic that day was due entirely to the schedules of the other drivers.

I, however, see it as God’s hand at work. 

It was a time when, as Barrett Browning put it in another poem: “God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,/ And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face.”

Whether the “sharp and sudden” answer to my prayer was due to my trip to and from South Jordan being a tiny act of mercy, and my article on the Dream Builder’s Breakfast will showcase the amazing mercy of those involved with Catholic Community Services Northern Utah, I don’t know.

I do know that I am thankful that for once I was able to see the bush afire rather than just the blackberries.