Every common bush afire with God...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806-1861

In the book I'm currently reading for our church's discussion group in a few weeks time I came across these inspiring lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Earth crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.

I suspect I'm not always so positive as she was and it's easy to imagine she wouldn't have been either if she had lived today amidst some of the most negative news headlines of recent years.

But, that may not be true!  That's because Browning wrote these words against a backdrop of personal struggle, challenge and disappointment.

She was brought up a Dissenter and perhaps she would have felt at least half at home in AFC because she once described herself as 'not a Baptist but a Congregationalist'. All her life she suffered from chronic spinal pain and lung problems, was disinherited by her father upon her marriage to the poet Robert Browning, was passed over for the post of Poet Laureate which, on the death of Wordsworth, went to Tennyson, and had four miscarriages before her son, Pen, was born.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew real pain yet continued to write poetry, work for the abolition of slavery and strove for better working condition for child labourers.

To see earth crammed with heaven in the light of Brexit and this week's breakdown in diplomatic trust between the UK and the USA takes some doing, but maybe we become more balanced and whole people when we try to make this connection.

The Jewish Scriptures show us the way in the stories of 'exile'. Even when wrenched from their homeland, our Jewish cousins were encouraged by their faith leaders to seek the good of the new country in which they found themselves, and to pray for its prosperity.

Finding goodness and encountering the divine even on the bleakest of days and in the most alien of contexts is part of a spiritual discipline that sees every common bush afire with God.