The Significance of Henry Thomas Hamblin
'Gaze at even the humblest flower and you will see in it the loving purpose of God'. Line 1, Chapter 1, 'The Message of a Flower', HT Hamblin, 1921.
I think most people reading this essay could agree that authentic spiritual teachings carry an energy that impact those who hear them and may, if the teachings are profound, affect even those who don't hear them first-hand but possibly years or centuries later. I suggest that the great teachers most closely associated with the main world religions are evidence of this. The world has been fortunate that spiritual teachers do not appear millennia apart but arise in many cultures and across history. Some are acknowledged as saints, others as sages; and some may never be noticed at all and live their lives anonymously, working to bring salvation, enlightenment or realisation to sentient beings. Not all of them are teachers, so they serve as they can. Some do have the gift for teaching and communication and they are the 'star turns' who leave a mark on us individually and as humanity. It is into this group that I would place H T Hamblin.
He is not widely recognised as a major spiritual influence today but, when one looks at the writings, one realises that they are consistent with the main themes of the spiritual teachings which have informed and driven the major religions of the world. We should also remember that at the height of his ministry his writing reached thousands of subscribers around the world.
The teachings are important, but he and other sages themselves were also the message, as their energy empowered the teachings. Many of the great teachers have told us that, in everyday life, things may be representational, but on deeper examination, say of a flower, the flower IS the message. It is not a sign or a symbol.
Marshall McLuan wrote a book whose title I shall slightly misquote as 'The Medium is the Message'. It is a significant book about the impact of technology on society and it tells us that we might see something but not register its meaning because, increasingly, we have become used to a conceptual and abstract world. We take writing, reading and graphic imagery and all their derivatives as symbols meaning something else.
Hamblin invites us to gaze at a flower, but in doing so we are also invited to gaze at the world. The flower is not a discrete thing; it is part of the connected whole. It is part of the creation made manifest. It has been brought to its full potential by evolution in a dynamic and creative system where every part of its existence is perfect. The seeds, roots, leaves are all perfect. Perfect reflections of that which is bringing them into being: the Divine.
In the opening sentence quoted at the start of this essay, we also see that there is a two-way communication in progress. He relays to us the knowledge that the flower reflects the loving purpose of creation. We are not separate from the flower. If we were detached from it there would be an indifference which could not give rise to any interaction with it or with nature. That understanding was his gift and it is his gift to us.
It may be that it is such indifference to the world, learned and spread globally during the past 300 years, that is making the continuance of life, as we are used to it on Earth, so difficult.
If we can respond to the flower then there is hope. A subsequent step in the growing awareness of that response is that we can see that everything is a manifestation of the divine. If developing that awareness were less difficult I would not be so awed by the lines from the 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', when the Mariner, seeing again the sea creatures he’d earlier reviled as ‘slimy things’, begins his redemption by seeing them differently:
'O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware'.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In that verse is repeated the idea that the sea creatures themselves are an emanation of the Divine and the Mariner receives the direct experience of that Truth. That is the start of his redemption. Although our paths to redemption will be different, there is proof that they will come to pass when we see we are no more and no less part of that same Divinity as a flower or 'slimy' sea creature or anything between. This is what Hamblin captures to a greater or lesser degree in his teachings and why they are worth maintaining and propagating.
I would like to offer my gratitude to all those who have worked for that purpose over the years and those that have fought so well to keep the torch burning. If only one person can carry that light forward then they have succeeded.
