Full-Eyed Love—Malcolm Guite

Note: This is an excerpt of Malcolm Guite’s essay, “Full-Eyed Love,” from the book Where the River Goes by Matthew Clark. The essay was written in response to the song, “The Dream of God,” which you can listen to and learn more about in the newest post on the Rabbit Room Music Substack.

by Malcolm Guite

When I was 19, and moving from atheism towards a greater spiritual openness, but by no means yet a Christian, I went for a long, slow walk round Ireland.

One evening, St. John’s Eve it was, right at the end of my journey, I came round a headland at sunset into a beautiful little bay and inlet on the west coast in Donegal, just as the fires were being lit. Already there was drinking and fiddle playing and dancing, and I asked where I was.

When they said “Glencolmcille,” I felt a sudden quickening and sense of connection, as though a memory stirred. They asked me my name and I said, “Malcolm.”

“Ah that is why you have come, because he has called you!” I said, “Who?” and they said, “Colm has called you, Malcolm, for this is the place he fought his battle and gathered his disciples and from here he left for the white martyrdom and Scotland.”

They went on to tell me the story of St. Columba, and the battle he had fought, of his repentance, his self-imposed exile, his journey with twelve disciples from this glen to Scotland where he founded the abbey of Iona from whence Scotland and much of the north of England was converted.

“Of course he is calling you here,” they said, “for your name in Gaelic means ‘servant of Colm,’ which is Columba.” And as they spoke I remembered at last, right back into my childhood, how I had been told stories about this saint, and how I was named for him, even how my grandmother had published poems about him and sung her lullaby for the infant Columba over me as a child.

As the night wore on, I wandered down to the shore whence he had set sail, and I thought: “I’m not a Christian, and I can’t imagine how I could ever become one, but if I do ever become one, I’ll remember Columba and I’ll go to Iona and thank him.”

The poet Michael O’Siadhail says in his wonderful poem “March On,”

He can't imagine it and still he must, A garden where beginnings and ends collide. Every image is trying to widen our trust.

Standing on that shore, before I knew the light of Christ’s face, I felt keenly just how thin the veil was, how something of heaven, whatever heaven might be, seemed to glimmer through the images of the sky and the sea itself in this place. Without my knowing it, I had long been on a pilgrimage, like Dante before me, towards a Great Unveiling, beckoned along a way of ever-widening trust to a Feast and a Face.

So much that I could not have imagined or dreamt was nonetheless being dreamt of on my behalf, as the Lord’s primary imagination drew me onward, wooing my own. As we look at Matthew Clark’s lovely song “The Dream of God,” we may be assured with its singer that God is wooing us, calling us, encouraging us to imagine the Good End, the Eucatastrophe, the Coming of the Kingdom, the Day of Resurrection.

“Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Ps. 30:5). And now, even in this pre-dawn dark, we are encouraged through this music to look over the event-horizon and imagine that morning, that awakening to a joy which no one can take from us.

“We can’t imagine it, but still we must,” and so, drawing on scripture, Clark offers a series of images that might begin to kindle that imagination, and, as O’Siadhail says, “every image is trying to widen our trust.” And what a cascade of trust-widening images this song offers us: the river flowing, the primrose growing, the morning mist rising, the spring after winter, the lifting of a veil, seeing and being seen—our beatific vision of God and his of us—the war ending in a single trumpet blast, the dawn breaking, the sleeper awakening.

Let’s look at a few of these image-emblems in more detail:

The River

The image of the River is not only the opening image of this song, but an image that runs through the whole of Matthew’s Well Trilogy and rises into the title of Where The River Goes.

The River also runs from the beginning to the end of Scripture. The four rivers run from Eden to water the world, the “streams make glad the city of God.” Even in the Babylonian exile there is a river to suggest the flowing Spirit as God’s presence and witness to our songs of lament. Ezekiel saw the pure waters flowing from the Temple, itself the promise of an Eden restored, and of course, upstream of all our exile and sorrow, flowing towards us from its source in our future there is the River of Life itself, on whose banks are the trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. That Paradisal River has always inspired the poets, as it did in Dante’s poignant line in the Paradiso, where the two great scriptural images of light and flowing water are fused and Dante sings: “And I saw light in the form of a river.” That line itself inspired me in my poem:

O Oriens E vidi lume in forme de riviera Paradiso XXX; 61 First light and then first lines along the east To touch and brush a sheen of light on water As though behind the sky itself they traced The shift and shimmer of another river Flowing unbidden from its hidden source; The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera. Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice Are bathing in it now, away upstream . . . So every trace of light begins a grace In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam Is somehow a beginning and a calling; “Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream For you will see the Dayspring at your waking, Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking."

That confluence of light and water imagery in Dante’s poem resonates especially with me as a lover of sailing. I learned to sail with my father who was a classicist, and when we were out sailing he loved to quote poetry, especially Homer, with his gripping accounts of the fleet that sailed “across the wine-dark sea.” “Messing about in boats,” as Water Rat says to Mole in The Wind in the Willows, brings me great peace and joy. Here is a wonderful passage from that book worth mentioning, since in Matthew’s song, we’re sitting by that Great River that “makes glad the city of God”:

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories . . .

We can feel the playfulness and joy in this passage. Psalm 46:4 says the river that flows through the city of God “delights” or makes “glad” the place where God and his people dwell together. Gladness is a word that has to do with light, laughter, happiness, blessing, and so we see light and water joined again as the shining face of God flows in joy to us through Christ who has made the light of God’s face to shine upon us.

C. S. Lewis told of another noble rodent like Mole who sailed with Caspian to the edge of the Narnian seas in a boat whose very name suggests Dante’s union of light and water; the Dawn Treader is a vessel that sails toward and, in some sense, upon the light. As its crew nears Aslan’s Country, the water at the end of the world ceases to be salty and becomes “drinkable light” enabling the sailors to endure the brightness that would otherwise undo them. In a similar way, the River that flows from the Temple not only beckons us toward a rising joy, but prepares us to bathe in a beauty that in our current state we cannot endure, frail as we are. Ezekiel’s river is already flowing and gathering depth, and as we are carried along we are being prepared for an Arrival.

Scripture is full of these baptismal images as we find water cleansing, healing, marking thresholds of exodus or entry from slavery into promised lands. Rivers flow to feed, waters gather to heal, to judge and renew, and to raise from their depths those who’ve been mired in darkness to be plunged into the un-blinding daylight of new creation. In the psalms, the deer pants for streams of water, and so do our darkling souls, but the water we thirst for, like the Samaritan woman in John 4, is the welling light of that beatific vision we, along with Dante and Reepicheep, are being beckoned toward: the Day-Spring, the shining face of Jesus.

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Malcolm Guite may be the closest thing to Bilbo Baggins that Christian poetry offers. He has numerous volumes of poetry and spiritual writing on offer, including Sounding the Seasons, Heaven in Ordinary, and The Word in the Wilderness. Last summer, we announced that Guite's long-awaited Arthuriad, Merlin's Isle will be published by Rabbit Room Press in several volumes over the coming years.

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Photo by Ainars Djatlevskis on Unsplash