Come away, O human child

“Come away, O human child: To the water and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

William Butler Yeats

The image above is of Slemish, a small mountain (large hill) where St. Patrick allegedly spent his teenage years as a slave tending sheep. I saw Slemish from the street outside our home almost everyday of my childhood.  Like Patrick, I labored in the shadow of this looming hill, beside my family, tending to other people’s property, enslaved by the poverty that is endemic to my homeland.

Slemish provokes memories of suffering.

And suffering is so obviously wrong, that everything within me cries out at the injustice inherent in suffering. But like that lump of rock clothed in grass suffering seems immune to my injunction.

My sister has cancer and she is just beginning the fight against this unjust fiend. A dear friend I know has fought cancer for years and each time we celebrate victory it has returned uninvited demanding of him to reignite the battle. Others fight the thousands of frightful forms illness takes, or they endure mourning from the legions that brought unexpected darkness into light filled lives, all the while battling against the hordes of hopelessness seeding loneliness and despair.

"The world is more full of weeping than I can understand."

W. B. Yeats had a way with words…

“If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.”

But poetry isn’t an answer to suffering, it is just a responsive dirge to the dismay such suffering leaves in its wake.

For so many the response to suffering seems to be found in a search for a reason, as if there ever could, or even should be a science to suffering.

For me the response to the agony of suffering is to

“Come away, O human child”

To take the supernatural hands of imagination and flow away into a mystical and mysterious world beyond the misery that is the present….

While we must at times groan alongside all of creation at the agony in this distorted world. I do believe that we can also take wing in flights of fancy, momentarily eluding the evasive nature of the suffering that finds us all at some point in our life’s journey.

Perhaps one of the great consolations of a divinely inspired active imagination is that we can escape the present by dreaming of a future without suffering.

Come away, O human child… let us dream of a tomorrow where we dance without suffering, delighting in the light and playing among our dreams that have finally come to life.