Finding God’s Grandeur During Crisis
By Amanda Pugh
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” claims the Jesuit priest, Anglican convert, and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In this time of craziness and confusion, though, it may be hard for us to see God’s presence, much less his grandeur. When the world is suffering, economies crashing, businesses closing, schedules interrupted, schools going online, families stuck at home together in “social distancing” and “self-isolation,” discouragement can run rampant. Furthermore, for many Catholics, a sudden lack of Mass and the Eucharist continue to challenge our sense of security and control. Where is God? Has He left us? Surely not, yet my heart cries out with our suffering Lord on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?”
In the later years of his life, Hopkins felt much the same way we might today. As a young man and student at Oxford, he followed in the footsteps of St. John Henry Newman, converting from Anglicanism to Catholicism and facing backlash from family and friends. None of that mattered to him, though, because without the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, religion had no meaning. After his conversion, he entered the Society of Jesus. The rigorous spiritual exercises of the society sharpened his already keen sense of God’s pervasive presence—found everywhere in the uniqueness of all creatures. Sky, birds, cows, fish, trees, shipwrecks, storms: you name it, and Hopkins could find God in it. His praise for the divine presence spilled into poetry with unusually intense patterns and innovative rhythm. These poems wouldn’t be published until nearly three decades after his early death in 1889.
Hopkins wasn’t always celebrating. Far from his home, living in industrialized Ireland, working long hours as a teacher, struggling with health issues, and suffering from depression, he wrote what scholars call the “terrible sonnets”—not terribly written, of course, but terrible because of the darkness Hopkins was experiencing. In these dark poems, Hopkins is deeply suffering and on the brink of despair, but he nevertheless manages to find God. God is present in these poems, although Hopkins describes himself as “wrestling” with Him. We, too, may find ourselves wrestling with God in prayer—but at least that means we’re praying! All Hopkins’s prayers felt like writing “dead letters”—but at least God gave him ability to write! From Hopkins’s poems, we can learn to find God even when it seems like He is absent. He is always there, even if we have to look a little harder or look a little differently at our circumstances.
The persistence of God’s presence hearkens back to one of Hopkins’s earlier poems, “God’s Grandeur.” I’ll let it speak for itself here. Read it a few times through. Even read it out loud, if you want:
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.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” he writes. He makes it sound glorious and beautiful. Bright and electric. It “flames out, like shining from shook foil.” God’s grandeur sounds like something we would surely notice. So why can it be so hard to find sometimes? The problem, I’ve come to realize, isn’t God’s absence. It is my blindness to his presence. It is humanity’s blindness to his presence. The whole world is “smeared” and “smudged” with the sad state of humanity, and that can cloud our view of God’s presence. But the poem doesn’t end there. With God’s help, Hopkins sees past the dirt and grime of suffering humanity and finds beauty. Similarly, now is a time to look into this worldwide crisis and find the “deep down things” that ultimately point us to God. Despite the world’s darkness, the poem ends with a discovery of the Holy Spirit hovering near the world, quietly “brooding” over us like a mother bird. The Lord was there all along; it just took some searching to find Him. His grandeur may not always flame out magnificently. Sometimes, “it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil/Crushed.” In other words, it may not come all at once in a way we recognize. We may have to look hard. It may take time. It may take the crushing of our wills to anoint us with the oil of gladness. For many of us now, the world seems a little darker than usual. But if we look a little deeper, lean just a little further into this uncertainty, perhaps in time we’ll find that God was with us all along.
For the text of some “terrible sonnets,” look here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44392/carrion-comfort ) and here (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44396/i-wake-and-feel-the-fell-of-dark-not-day).
For a fuller listing of Hopkins’s poetry, look here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22403 ).
For a short biography of Hopkins, look here: (https://poets.org/poet/gerard-manley-hopkins ).
