Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

                     Sunday/Treasure and Pearl

In today's gospel, the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, a pearl of great price. These are interesting smilies, physical representations of the spiritual. And strange suggestions. Both are appropriated, not created, found and not earned. More, they are both of oblique origin, the treasure is someone else's, the pearl the reaction to an impurity.


The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

R. S. Thomas