1
12—AND THEN THE DARK WOOD AGAIN
1
UNDERSTANDEST’ thou what thou readest?”—so Philip to the Ethiopian. Understandest thou what thou seest?—so my thought, “running thither” to the unknown fellow traveler who opens on this page, would ask. For it may be I am mistaken in hoping that these figures of the true will have a voice for others. And yet a wise book says, “A picture may with more fancy convey a story to a man than a plain narrative either in word or writing.”
Perhaps this second wood may find the traveler startled or depressed by a recurrence of some trial which he had thought was well behind him. “I have not passed this way heretofore,” he had said to himself when he entered the first dark wood. “I shall henceforth return no more that way.” Nor does he, but perhaps just after a clear vision of peace from some House Beautiful he finds confronting him something very like the dark wood of earlier days. It is in fact a further reach of that wood.
Here is one, perhaps an athlete, who has never been ill and never contemplated illness. He has become the vassal of Eternal Love. Look, love, and follow. Prince Charlie engraved this motto on his seal when he came to call the clans to suffer and die for him. The words are engraved upon the life of this soldier who has looked, loved, and followed his Prince overseas. But his first year sees him handicapped by illness. He recovers, is struck down again, he who never was ill before. This repeated illness, battle wound though it be—so unexpected, so exhausting—can appear like a very dark wood. Battle wounds may sound heroic, but they do not feel so.
Or the dark wood may be that scorched and arid feeling that leaves the soul like our South Indian foothills in drought:
Faint is the famished forest-green,
And parched the pools of the ravine;
The burning winds have blown away
The soft blue mist of yesterday.
The furry creatures of the wood
Have fled and left a solitude.
No song of merry, singing bird
Or laughter of the stream is heard.
*****
So, Lord my God, Thy child would be,
If for one hour bereft of Thee.
But Thy great fountains from afar
Flow down to where Thy valleys are;
And for the least is nourishment,
Verdure and song and heart-content.
For where Thou art, there all is well,
Our Life of life, Immanuel.
How often we have known the flowings of those fountains: it is not our Lord’s pleasure that His valleys should be dry. But sometimes we are kept waiting for a while. If that be so, our thirst “hath some nourishing virtue in it, and giveth sap to humility, and putteth an edge on hunger, and furnisheth a fair field to faith to put forth itself, and to exercise its fingers in gripping it seeth not what.” I will wait upon the Lord that hideth His face. I will look for Him. I will not be discouraged even though I am not given “little overflowings of spiritual joy and sensible pleasures and delicacies in prayer.” Ye seek Me because ye did eat of the loaves. He loves us to seek Him just for Himself.
But often He gives us loaves, or if a loaf would be too much, a crumb.
To one, terribly injured by a runaway horse, such a crumb was given in that difficult hour after the surgeon had done his work and there was nothing to do but lie still and endure. “As I lay with my head and neck between sandbags, helpless as an infant” (this was her story afterwards), “wondering about it all, I heard a voice say distinctly to me, ‘You have often said to yourself and to others, Naught but in love denied. You have now to believe and receive, Naught but in love permitted.’ It was just the word I needed.”
After such a consoling word there is always the prayer that God calls a song. There may not be strength for anything that we would call singing, but the faintest little whispering prayer reaches our Father’s ear as a song: for as His majesty is, so also is His mercy. This small inconspicuous word of comfort is like a little flower in a field of greater flowers. It grows somewhat out of sight, but it will fill our room with fragrance if we pluck it and take it home.{9}