“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 midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter
Up vistaed hopes I sped
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.”
– Francis Thompson, 1917
Francis Thompson was an English poet born in 1859 to a wealthy family. His parents wanted him to become a physician like his father. He failed the exam three times then finally had enough and ran off to London. It’s there that Francis Thompson became addicted to opium and lived in destitution. He submitted a poem to a magazine, whose editors, a couple named Wilfred and Alice Meynell, sought out and found Francis in desperate condition, and took him in.
Drug use continued to take a toll on Francis’ health and he lived as an hermit in extreme poverty and poor health. A prostitute, who Francis later wrote about but never named, rescued him from the streets, took him in, and shared her income with him. In 1892, Francis lived near and received help from a Franciscan community and finally escaped his drug addiction. It was here that “The Hound of Heaven” was first published. He died in 1907 from tuberculosis at the age of 48.
In a way, I think Francis understood the Gospel on a level that is often missed or taken for granted. Francis understood that God had been passionately pursuing after him and he could not out run or escape his grasp. This is the Gospel – God passionately pursues a rebellious people and draws them into fellowship with Himself. He goes to such length as to enter His creation, live a perfect life of obedience, suffer, die, and rise again.
At times it feels like God is far from us; that God does not care nor love. Nothing can be further from the truth.
“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” – Romans 8:38-39
J.F.X. O’Connor describes Thompson’s poem as follows:
GREATER DEPTHS 