God’s Grandeur: an introduction
Photo by Sina Katirachi on Unsplash
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.
"God's Grandeur," Gerard Manley Hopkins (emphasis mine)
Welcome to my own little corner of the internet. I’m Marie. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about a lot of seemingly disparate subjects, all of which are fair game for future appearances here:
- Christianity
- Books, particularly YA lit
- Whole-life politics: pro-immigrant, pro-healthcare, pro-life
- Personality pop psychology (primarily MBTI – maybe it’s not science but it sure is fun!)
- Occasional ‘lifestyle’ reflections as a millennial/spouse/parent of small humans
If there’s a unifying theme to this blog, Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur” embodies it. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” I want to attend to that shining wherever I find it. I want to turn over in my hands the things that “wear man’s smudge and share man’s smell” because I still believe that “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” I know that despite the blearing and smearing I see around me, “the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods” and the sun is poised to spring into morning.
Leave a Reply