The Gate of the Year

We can never be sure what might come of something we write.

Minnie Louise Haskins certainly never expected the leader of her country to quote from a little poem she had written thirty-one years earlier.

But he did.  He read from one of her poems on a broadcast as the nation was entering a war.  That excerpt has been widely quoted over the past seventy-five years, and the entire poem is quoted below.

Ms Haskins didn’t think of herself primarily as a poet.  She taught philosophy and sociology in college, but she did publish two or three books of poetry.

She was born and educated near Bristol, England, in 1875 and had a lifelong religious anchoring.  She went out to India as a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, and she published some of her books of poetry to raise funds to make this possible.

Her health broke, and she returned to England, where she worked at various jobs before joining the faculty at the London School of Economics and Political Science at age forty-three.

King George VI read from her poem on Christmas Eve 1939 in a radio broadcast to offer encouragement to the nation shortly after England and France had declared war on Hitler’s Germany.

Ms Haskins, who was sixty-four at the time, didn’t even hear King George’s Christmas Eve broadcast when he read from her writing.  But the poem titled, “God Knows,” has been often quoted under the better known title, “The Gate of the Year,” words from the first line.

We want to think we are self-sufficient, and the poet wants that status as she asks for light.  She doesn’t realize, if the Man at the Gate of the Year should give light to her, she would be dependent on him, rather than sufficient in herself.

Many so-called self-made men and women attained their wealth and fame from family inheritance, government subsidies, or “lucky breaks” opened by sources other than themselves.

Regardless of our financial success or social standing, everyone, from Warren Buffet to the homeless man who sleeps in a box in the alley, faces an uncertain future.  We may have warm houses, CDs in the bank, and sturdy bodies.  But we have no guarantee that any of these benefits will hold in the year ahead.

"GOD KNOWS"

Minnie Louise Haskins

1908

And I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better to you than light, and safer than a known way.’ 

So, I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night

And He led me toward the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

So, heart, be still!

What need our little life,

Our human life, to know,

If God hath comprehension?

In all the dizzy strife

Of things both high and low

God hideth His intention.

God knows. His will
Is best. The stretch of years
Which wind ahead, so dim
To our imperfect vision,
Are clear to God. Our fears
Are premature; In Him,
All time hath full provision.

Then rest: until
God moves to lift the veil
From our impatient eyes,
When, as the sweeter features
Of Life’s stern face we hail,
Fair beyond all surmise
God’s thought around His creatures
Our mind shall fill.

Miss Minnie is wise in recommending that we reach out in the gathering dark and put our hands into the Hand of God.