Lambs that Learn to Walk in Snow
About a month ago, I stumbled upon a poem by the 20th-century English poet, Philip Larkin, that struck me as a perfect encapsulation of the rich season of Advent that begins this week. For those who know Larkin, you might raise an eyebrow that a work from someone who once said, “I am an atheist — an Anglican atheist, of course,” could be looked to for Christian wisdom. Well, as another English poet said about 200 years before Larkin, “God moves in a mysterious way.”
Here is Larkin’s poem, “First Sight.”
Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.
As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
Advent reminds us that we are all living in the Time Between Christ’s first and second coming; a time that can often feel like a “vast unwelcome” — dark, fallen and “wretched” with the cold sting of injustice and Sin. And yet, as we stumble to and fro, our hope lies in the powerful image from the second stanza — lambs that “wait beside” our ewe, the very Lamb of God that has taken away the sins of the world. Larkin envisions the lamb’s “fleeces wetly caked” and I imagine our Lamb in Christ, incarnate and living in this broken world, bearing the full weight of all that separates us from our relationship with Him, even (and most especially) Death itself.
This Advent, and always for that matter, I imagine myself as a shivering lamb, huddled against the warmth and protection of that Lamb — our God and Savior who promises you and me, the people of His pasture, something we cannot possibly grasp: the immeasurable surprise of new heavens and a new Earth landscaped in righteousness (2 Peter 3:13) and life in the unmediated presence of our merciful God, a life so “utterly unlike the snow.”
