Receive These Hands

David A. Kent teaches English at Centennial College and is the editor of
Christian Poetry in Canada.

Receive These Hands, a book of inspirational reflections, oscillates between snippets of verse and passages of prose. It was written by John Hanly Morgan for both individuals and small groups (“wherever people come thoughtfully together,” as an accompanying promotional leaflet has it). Despite some unfortunate typos, the volume has been nicely designed for a book so evidently the product of private financing, and it does embody the meditations of a thoughtful, intelligent man pondering the modern world and moralizing, or philosophizing, on perennial issues such as the relative virtues of child-like innocence and adult experience (in Recapturing). Morgan is a genial, if at times a forgivably boring, host. Section one (“Come In”) welcomes the reader in; the final section (“Go Well”) bids him farewell. There are no explicitly Christian motifs or themes in the collection (although vestiges appear, as in the echo “World without End”), but Morgan’s popularizing orientation is finally positive, hopeful, even “upbeat.” The world of nature and the long reaches of evolutionary time both call up “sublime” emotions, as do the prospects for space travel and, on a prophetic note, space colonization. The latter, like certain apocalyptic claims (“Moving”), is less appealing because the present becomes the crucial epoch in human history: “This is the age of the beginning of the great change” (“Commitment”). Morgan’s overriding exhortative ends do risk truism, sentimentalities, and arbitrary rhymes bent to regularity. On the other hand, the book does show signs of design: for example, compare the internal allusions between pages 28 and 61;the four inner sections are keyed to the seasons; and there are two outer groupings in addition to the introduction and conclusion. Among Morgan’s homiletic and sometimes liturgical effects, there are genuinely fine touches: the delightful “Monsters,” the Blakean “Cooling It,” and “Deja Vu” — ”a true story in praise of coincidence.” Morgan takes joy in the ordinary and wishes his reader to do the same. There will be some who will.