Fr. JC Maximilian

Francis Thompson was a British poet who lived from 1859 until 1907.  He had a very difficult life.  He was trained as a physician, but his medical career was an utter failure.  He had a very troublesome relationship with his father which resulted in him being homeless for several years.  Most of his adult life he struggled with an addiction to opium.  Both his circumstances and his sins made his life miserable.  Yet his greatest work, an autobiographical poem entitled “The Hound of Heaven,” is considered one of the greatest Christian poems of all time.  In this 182 line poem Thompson beautifully tells about a God who refuses to abandon even the most determined sinner.

In the poem, the protagonist is madly searching for happiness, but in all the wrong places.  During his misguided search for happiness, he is relentlessly pursued by a hunting dog, a hound.  The hound is a symbol of God, who loves us too much to ever give up on us, and He is too well “trained” so that nothing that we can do will ever shake Him off our trail.  The poem begins with a description of his flight from God and his vain search for happiness in other things:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

At the end of the poem, after he has no place else to run to, the hound catches up to him and says:

Rise, clasp My hand, and come!
… Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou drivest love from thee, who drivest Me.

Like every other human being, the deepest desire of our heart is to be happy; a desire for infinite love, infinite truth, and infinite beauty.  Like Thompson, we often search madly for happiness in all the wrong places, often fleeing from God, the only source of eternal and infinite happiness.  What the poem teaches us is that nothing we do can lessen God’s love for us.  He is faithful, and His hand is always outstretched to save us from ourselves.

The drama of “The Hound of Heaven” in nothing new.  Seven-hundred years before the coming of Christ, when the Kingdom of Israel was falling apart, God promised that He would not abandon His people.  He promised to send a descendent of King David — “a shoot from the stump of Jesse” — to be our Savior.  Two-thousand years ago when Jesus was born, that promise was fulfilled.  God is faithful.

To make sure that the suffering people of Israel would recognize this Savior, God sent a messenger to announce His arrival:  John the Baptist.  Before Jesus began His public ministry, the Holy Spirit sent John to make the preparations.  John reminded the people of Israel of their covenant with God, and informed them that the promised Messiah was soon to arrive.  John the Baptist told them to get ready for the arrival of the Messiah by repenting of their sins.

These are the actions of a faithful God who keeps His promises.  And just as He kept His promises to the People of Israel, so too does He keep His promises to us.  On the day of our baptism, God promised that He would never abandon us.  He adopted us as His children and became our Father.  He promised that He would always sustain us with His grace, love and truth.  In his recent encyclical, Spe Salvi (The Hope that Saves), Pope Benedict XVI writes, “Man’s great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God — God who has loved us and who continues to love us ‘to the end,’ until all ‘is accomplished’” (#27).

The whole Advent season tells us that God is faithful, and that means that He is worthy of our trust.  In this post-modern, post-Christian world we need to have someone we can trust.  How can we keep on the right track, the path to true happiness, when we are surrounded by so many contradictory opinions?  How can we know what is true and good, what is morally right, when there are hundreds of television channels and 1 billion Web sites that are all communicating their own theory of values?  How can we find true happiness in life when every year 100,000 new books are published in the US, each one pointing to happiness in its own direction?

We must always keep in mind; GOD IS FAITHFUL!  His Gospel is trustworthy, true and unchanging.  His Church, through which He has promised to guide us until the end of time, in spite of the imperfections and frailties of its pastors, never tires of reminding us about the essential truths, the top priorities, the milestones on the path to meaning, interior peace, and everlasting happiness.

GOD IS FAITHFUL!  Therefore we should obey His voice; expressed in the Ten Commandments, in our well-formed consciences, and in the Church’s official teaching about faith and morals.  To do so is to put ourselves and our loved ones inside the only boat that is guaranteed to make it to the port of heaven.

The Hound of Heaven is set loose.  Instead of running from Him, let us run to embrace that Hound, for He is “He Whom thou seekest!”