Let not your heart be troubled – Malcolm Guite
Here is another sonnet in my series on the sayings of Jesus, “Parable and Paradox.” This one is called “Let not your heart be troubled and is a reflection on the passage of John 14:1-3, so often read at funerals. You may remember them: “Let not your heart be troubled, you believe in God, believe also in me, in my Father’s house are many many mansions, if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again to receive you unto myself, that where I am, you may be also.”
Always there comes this parting of the ways
The best is wrested from us, borne away,
No one is with us always, nothing stays,
Night swallows even the most perfect day.
Time makes a tragedy of human love,
We cleave forever to the one we choose
Only to find ‘forever’ in the grave.
We have just time enough to love and lose.
You know too well this trouble in our hearts
Your heart is troubled for us, feels it too,
You share with us in time that shears and parts
To draw us out of time and into you.
I go that you might come to where I am
Your word comes home to us and brings us home.
© Malcolm Guite from Parable and Paradox: Sonnets of the sayings of Jesus and other Poems, Canterbury Press 2016 www.malcolmguite.com
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