One of William Blake's most wonderful poems has a title that I think probably rings quite strangely to modern ears, "The Little Black Boy."
The poem is from Blake's Songs of Innocence And Experience, published in 1789. Click that link to the title of the poem to read Blake's poem in its entirety.
The following lines from the poem came to me on a recent Sunday, as I participated by way of Zoom in an online Quaker Meeting held in Patagonia, Arizona on Sunday, May 3, 2026:
Look on the rising sun: there God does liveAnd gives his light, and gives his heat away.....
And we are put on earth a little space,That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
These lines of the poem moved me to understand that final phrase, "the beams of love," to be true in the two different meanings of the word "beams."
We are here, indeed, "a little space," to feel and absorb, and to learn how to bring into ourselves those "beams" of love that irradiate our persons and our lives, and do so for everyone, and the world entire.
But we are also called to learn, in this life, how to utilize and carry those "beams," like the sometimes heavy timbers with which we build any kind of edifice, and from those beams of love, given to us so freely, to construct a home, a society, a world that is created, and fashioned, from "Love" itself.
Those words from Blake's poem came to me, quite unanticipatedly, in that Zoom Friends' Meeting, as I sat with my wife, and a friend, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, and those words from the poem were not unfamiliar. Those very words, as I have presented them above, were written on the invitation to our wedding, held in September 1969 at the Palo Alto Friends Meetinghouse.
How I hope I have done something, in my life, that would qualify me as having accomplished what the mother told her son was ours to do - to learn to "bear the beams of love," to receive in gratitude and joy the love that is the essence of the gift of life, and to meet the challenge of those words, in their other sense, and to bear and carry those "beams of Love" and to use them to build a better home, and a better society, and a world that can shelter, protect, and be a joyous place of residence for every one us.
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