Tennyson, the Bomb, and Transfiguration

"Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow."
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850)


"A bright light filled the plane. The first shock-wave hit us. We were eleven and a half miles slant range from the atomic explosion but the whole airplane cracked and crinkled from the blast... We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud... mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall."
--Col. Paul Tibbets, commander of the Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.


"And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white."   --Matthew 17: 2


Today is an odd conjunction of four events.  First, it is Alfred, Lord Tennyson's birthday today.  He was born in 1809 and became England's most famous and celebrated poet of the mid-nineteenth century.  I continue to teach his poetry when I can, for I have always loved his strong command of image and sound.  In his poem "In Memoriam A.H.H." he uses light as a metaphor for the sometimes obscure paths of faith.   Today is also the 66th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  "A bright light filled the plane," Colonel Paul Tibbets recalled.  The hundred million-degree, sun-bright inferno below incinerated thousands of Japanese civilians and hastened the end of World War II.  Today is also the Feast of the Transfiguration, and the revelation of a different kind of light, signifying our own transformations.  Today is also my birthday.  I see no particular significance in the coincidence of dates, but  the conjunction each year makes me think of our god-imaged potential as human beings and what we can create:  Poems, bombs, children.  It is a day of beginnings, endings, and all the transformations in between.