Posts
***
Images of the Holy easily become holy images--sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?
[...] We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.
***
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Lewis shoots so true in "A Grief Observed." I think, perhaps, he is at his truest in that slim tome--truth not just for the grieving but for all of us who yet walk beneath the shadow of death. It seems God so often fills our eyes with tears so that we might see truth.
ReplyDeleteGreat Hopkins poem, too. One could write at length on both.
I find such comfort in others' words right now, when I find myself so wordless.
DeleteThat's one of my (many) favorite poems.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
It's one of mine, too. [Yet another reason why we're twins.]
DeleteKristen gave me a Gerard Manley Hopkins collection at the funeral. That's a girl who knows me pretty well despite the cracks caused by years and circumstance.
There's such an immediate sort of comfort in imagining the Holy Ghost bent brooding over us.
That's all I could think of when Sarah said, "We lost our Mother Hen" at Dad's funeral. We did, but only the earthly shadow of the greater heavenly One. The mother hen gathers its chicks under those bright wings.
ReplyDelete