What to Make of a Diminished Thing

I’d like to introduce you to Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson went to the University of Cambridge and graduated in 1783. He was ordained a deacon in the Anglican church that same year but did not continue into the priesthood as his father had done. Two years later, he entered a Latin essay competition and was asked to answer the question, “Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?”

Clarkson won the competition with his answer and was subsequently troubled and possessed by the research he gathered for the Essay. Of his travel from London back to Cambridge post-competition, he journaled, “I stopped my horse occasionally, and dismounted and walked. I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my Essay could not be true. The more however I reflected upon them, or rather upon the authorities on which they were founded, the more I gave them credit. I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end. Agitated in this manner I reached home. This was the summer of 1785.”

Clarkson’s sense of Divine calling that he “should see these calamities to their end” propelled him over the years to come. He would travel more than 35,000 miles across Britain to gather physical evidence from slave ships and conducted interviews with 20,000 sailors—the “authorities” that Clarkson previously referred to. There were several occasions (most notably at the port town of Liverpool) when Clarkson would risk his life to collect ever-more material to bolster his case against the very profitable slave trade. Sounds something like the Apostle Paul’s encounter with the Ephesian merchants in Acts 19.  

Clarkson would eventually enlist the better-known William Wilberforce, a fellow Anglican connected with the British Parliament. Wilberforce was sympathetic with the work Clarkson was doing, and a question about the slave trade was soon put before the House of Commons. Where it quickly died. In 1791, Wilberforce introduced the first Bill to abolish the slave trade, and it also died with a 163-88 vote.

Year after year, Clarkson (the campaign’s quiet engine) and Wilberforce (the campaign’s public voice), along with their supporters, introduced motions in Parliament in favor of abolition. And every year the House of Lords voted to keep slavery going. By 1794, Clarkson’s health was failing—likely some combination of exhaustion and compassion fatigue.

More darkly, unknown except to a few, Clarkson was beginning to lose his faith. Some of Clarkson’s friends had him retire from the campaign for a season and sent him to the Lake District. Clarkson ended up purchasing a cottage in which to hide. What Clarkson didn’t know is that at the other end of the village lived Samuel Taylor Coleridge—a famous British Romantic poet who happened to also be an abolitionist sympathizer and Clarkson fanboy.

As Providence would have it, Clarkson and Coleridge happened to meet one day. Coleridge was surprised to find the hero who inspired him now exhausted and depressed. But these two were Englishmen—meaning, they didn’t share any of these details with each other at the time. However, they would begin writing letters to each other.

In one of his letters, Clarkson opened up and wrote, “My dear Coleridge, let me confess: I have no idea anymore of the Divine.” It was honest and raw. Coleridge then wrote back to him and said, “My dear Clarkson, don’t worry now whether you have any idea of the Divine. But never forget that you are a Divine idea!”

Coleridge is saying to Clarkson something like, “The Lord thought of Thomas Clarkson. And He wanted to speak Thomas Clarkson into the world for this moment. And the Lord has not yet finished saying what He has to say. The Lord is the Logos and you and I, Thomas, are Logoi—we are little words being spoken by the Word. So let Jesus finish saying what he has to say to the world through you.”

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Hold that thought while I pivot to the American poet, Robert Frost. Some time ago as I was preparing to teach a class on aging, I came across Frost’s poem, The Oven Bird. I didn’t use it at the time, but I’ve kept it in a folder for such a time as this. As Frost’s poem unfolds, there’s a progression through the seasons—spring to summer to fall—that corresponds to a person’s progression through life—youth to mid to old age. Here is the poem:

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

I cannot help but see and feel the connection between The Oven Bird and the effect of Clarkson’s lifelong calling upon him. Coleridge finds his hero—at one time “a singer everyone has heard”—diminished after years of commitment, labor, disappointment, and service of love. Which I hold in tension with all the Scriptures I know about the Spirit of Christ being a well of water springing up inside of us, nourishing us and bearing fruit, even in old age.

That said, I have no simple way to tidy up the end of this post. I’ve worked at the conclusion for an hour now with nothing I can reduce to three sentences. And maybe that’s the point. Live long enough and life will take it out of you—age, illness, labor, harms done by others, self-inflicted harms, the Fall. Walk with Jesus deeply enough and He will give life back to you—redeeming grace, renewed strength, faith to endure, mercies every day.

Because Jesus Christ, God’s eternal Word, still speaks, and He will have the final word.