The Vale of Tears

                                        The Vale of Tears

Today is Trinity Sunday which celebrates a distinctive, if distracting, Christian idea, as if the Trinity was a more difficult concept than the Incarnation. It contains the last recorded statements of Christ, urging his followers to follow His teachings and redeclaring His own divinity. As so much of the gospel, it is fertile, despite its brevity. Reiterating that He is the Son of the Father, He explains why all this happened in one phrase: "For God so loved the world." Christ is saying that God loves the world.

"World" in the Greek is "cosmos," a word with broad meaning. It can mean anything from the concerns of individual man to the universe. In this situation, remarkably, the word does not confine the meaning. God's active interest, concern, and affection is the point. In the seemingly cold, indifferent universe, God loves the world. That love is the motive for God's sacrifice. God's sacrifice!
The world should sing.

Following the Enlightenment, the Romantic, Wordsworth, had a more fearful take, decrying human separation from that cold cosmos:

The World Is Too Much With Us
BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.