2 thoughts on “Life as a Walk Through a Dark Wood”

1. When St. Edwin of Northumbria was converting his kingdom, one of the pagans who chose to convert said this:

   “The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before of what is to follow we are utterly ignorant.”

   Chesterton modified it in The Ballad of the White Horse:

   ‘For this is a heavy matter,
   
   And the truth is cold to tell;
   
   Do we not know, have we not heard,
   
   The soul is like a lost bird,
   
   The body a broken shell.

   ‘And a man hopes, being ignorant,
   
   Till in white woods apart
   
   He finds at last the lost bird dead;
   
   And a man may still lift up his head
   
   But never more his heart.

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2. That’s good stuff, Grim. Thank you.

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