Before Thinking Splits To Fear

O how
Shall we think these moments out
Before thinking splits to fear
– from A Sleep Of Prisoners

I was born in 1952, in the midst of the great economic boom. In my schooling, I was led to believe that the evils of the war were behind us, and a Golden Age was unfolding — a free world arising.

A Sleep Of Prisoners, written in 1951, tells a different story. Four soldiers are held prisoner in a church in enemy territory, and struggle to keep their sanity. Each of them slip across the threshold into a dream world and find themselves enacting scenes from the Hebrew Bible, culminating in an searing encounter with Nebuchadnezzar and his furnace.

In the blaze of the furnace, Peter Able cries from the pulpit:

The blaze of this fire
Is wider than any man’s imagination.
It goes beyond any stretch of the heart.

Tim Meadows responds:

The human heart can go the lengths of God…
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.

Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake!

Sleeping prisoners no more.