Thomas Traherne was a seventeenth-century Anglican cleric not well known in his own time and then ignored for two hundred years. In the early twentieth century, however, Bertram Dobell collected, lightly edited, and published a series of spiritual writings as Centuries of Meditations (1908). No less a fan than C. S. Lewis commends Traherne to us as a devotional writer. So I’ve been reading him.
Traherne is deeply impressed by the beauties of creation and calls on the believer to receive them and enjoy them as if they were given solely to each of us by our loving Father. In today’s reading, he fastens on our bodies as treasures:
My limbs and members, when rightly prized, are comparable to fine gold…. The topaz of Ethiopia and the gold of Ophir are not to be compared to them. What diamonds are equal to my eyes; what labyrinth to my ears; what gates of ivory or ruby leaves to the double portal of my lips and teeth?
Is not sight a jewel? Is not hearing a treasure? Is not speech a glory? O my Lord, pardon my ingratitude and pity my dullness who am not sensible of these gifts. The freedom of Thy bounty has deceived me. These things were too near to be considered.
Last evening at a friend’s birthday party I met a man, not much older than myself, who has led an interesting life. He was wearing a Harley-Davidson cap, so we immediately began to share our love of motorcycling.
Turns out he knows vastly more than I do about it, having competed for Canada’s Kawasaki road race team in his youth. So for the next twenty minutes, I battered him with questions about Harleys versus Gold Wings, BMWs versus Triumphs, and why Ducati bikes seem to be Hollywood’s choice to signal a particularly cool character.
Then he mentioned guitars, and off we went for another twenty minutes on the virtues of Ovations versus standard flattops, how we differently string our respective 5-string Fender basses, and how a friend of his started the Duncan Africa Society to build guitars in Uganda that would rival my Pennsylvania-made Martin. We moaned about the virtual monopoly Long & McQuade has over the Canadian retail scene. And he was about to talk about his youthful playing in a blues band when we had to sing to the birthday boy.
The conversation was a blast—until, after the song, he held up his clever hands and said quietly, “I can’t close either one. I’m waiting for a rheumatology consultation and it might be another year before I get one.”
Can’t ride. Can’t play.
I just had my guitars set up by a local luthier and have been enjoying playing them all again this week. To think of just staring at them instead, and then staring at my painful hands, is awful. Yet maybe I should, at least in humble imagination.
As Traherne says, the gifts of God are so many and so close to us—our own hands!—that we typically fail to enjoy them, let alone deliberately give thanks for them. I wonder if a good spiritual discipline might be to go without one each day.
Rather like fasting, we might decide to pick a limb, or an organ, or even a finger, and imagine going through a single typical day without it—or with it hurting all the time. How we would appreciate it, in our loss of it. How we would pray!
And then getting it back, whole and healthy. How we would rejoice! How we would thank God for his (new) gift!
My late grandmother’s favourite hymn, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” is based on Lamentations 2:22-23: “It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.”
And how are “the Lord’s mercies . . . new every morning”? As I rise from sleep on any given day, I could find any of the previous day’s blessings missing. Overnight, a part of my body could have stopped working, or started to pain me. Overnight, I could have lost my retirement fund in a stock crash, or my home in a fire. Overnight, a friend or family member could have died.
Each morning, then, when I don’t suffer such a loss, I am in effect being freshly gifted by God with the blessings I rather mindlessly experienced the day before: my left hand and my right hand; my left leg and my right; all of my organs functioning properly; and my mind not yet ravaged by a stroke, or Alzheimer’s, or schizophrenia, or some other neurological nightmare possibly waiting for me down life’s road.
I am praying, then, for my new friend’s healing. I am praying also that God meanwhile will teach and train him in whatever he needs to learn through the severe mercy of this manual debility and discomfort.
And I am praying that I may learn from his trouble and trial at least to be newly thankful for God’s blessings to me, “new every morning”—as I get back today what I enjoyed yesterday, a veritable fountain of blessing.
Or perhaps “minus one,” in my imagination. What should it be today?
