Words Half Heard: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Showing posts with label Gerard Manley Hopkins. Show all posts

Sunday, February 28, 2016

After the Ashes: Beauty

Last Saturday I had the good fortune to see Max McLean’s one-man show, The Most Reluctant Convert, the story of C. S. Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. In it, McLean recounts a brief moment from Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, a first, fleeing glimpse of beauty:

my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew.

It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton's 'enormous bliss' of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to 'enormous') comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?...Before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse... withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased....

That glimpse of beauty, fragile, fleeting, quickly withdrawn, called to Lewis across decades and became part of an inward quest.

The mention of the childhood garden set me wondering about my own childhood glimpses of beauty and brought me to James Baldwin’s very different, yet somehow similar memory:

When I was very young, and was dealing with my buddies in those wine- and urine-stained hallways, something in me wondered, What will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it yet, are very beautiful. And when I sat at Elijah's table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God's – or Allah's – vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then?

Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins struggled with this throughout his short life (he was thirty-four when he died). What will happen to all that beauty? A pair of challenging poems, The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo, address the question head on:

HOW to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such,
nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace,
láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty

My Lenten discipline this year is to focus my heart on things that will last, treasures that will remain after whatever “vengeance,” as Baldwin called it, is achieved, after the fire of human fury, or folly, or environmental destruction.

This week’s word and work is beauty.

Not an easy word to track.

Turning to Hebrew and Greek lexicons, I find over 20 very different words translated sometimes as “beauty” or “beautiful," but carrying literal meanings like pleasant, dignified, adorned, sweet, delightful, precious, boastful, arrogant, glorious, vigorous; “scraped of all impurity”.

I wrote of one word translated “beautiful” several years ago: Towb. It’s used in Genesis One, when God looks at creation and said it’s “good.” That word “good” is an astonishing flattening of a word that could be interpreted beautiful, sweet, pleasing, happy, prosperous, bountiful, agreeable, harmonious.

What is beauty?

Where does beauty come from?

Who decides what, or who, is beautiful?

Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 3:11, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.”

Lewis believed that beauty as we experience it is a glimpse of something beyond this world we live in, a way of seeing we can only hold for a moment:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (The Weight of Glory)

Two quick stories of my own, of seeing beauty just for a moment in a way that calls me on toward something more:

A young woman at the camp where I worked as a kid grated on my nerves. I lived all year for camp: a beautiful, peaceful place in the Catskill Mountains. That summer I found myself stuck, again and again, across the table from a person I considered ugly, whiny, endlessly irritating.

Sitting across from her at staff devotions one evening, I prayed, “God, help me see her as you do.” And saw beauty. Saw past the downturned mouth to a glorious smile. Saw past the constant unhappiness to a longing to be welcomed. Glimpsed a dearly loved daughter of God in as much need of embrace as I was myself. It changed my response to her, changed her response to me.

Another quick story: walking once in a scrubby municipal park in a sandy suburb near Miami, I was joined by a flock of wood stork, scratching along the edges of the parking lot. Wood stork! Walking along beside me as if I was a bird myself.

As we walked along we encountered a deer, just standing on the edge of scrubby little woods, and then, in a tree just above us, a cloud of little kinglets went flitting from branch to branch, sometimes just inches from my head, tiny tinkling birds, some with bright golden crowns, some with red, dozens merrily snapping up invisible bugs as if I wasn’t there at all.

Two different experiences of beauty where beauty wasn’t expected.

Both hints of a country I’ve never yet visited, a place where every person is radiantly loved, a landscape where lion lies down with lamb and humans walk with wood stork, kinglets and deer.

Isaiah prophecied:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion— to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.

Beauty instead of ashes. Beauty from ashes?

Some plants, like sequoias and lodgepole pine, only grow when the resinous coating of their seeds has been melted by searing forest fires.

Some eucalyptus trees can withstand incredible heat to spring back from their roots a scouring blaze.

Some Australian grass trees only bloom after intense heat.

South African fire lilies can lie dormant for years until flames sweep away the debris covering them; after a fire, they can blossom almost overnight.

What if the real beauty, the lasting beauty, is yet to be revealed?

Hopkin’s poem The Leaden Echo, concluded with the thought that there’s nothing we can do to stop time, to hold beauty:

So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.

Yet that poem was immediately followed by another, The Golden Echo:

I do know such a place, Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth

The language is difficult, but the idea is clear: there is a place where the best of beauty remains:

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God,
beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost;
every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.

Lewis, like Hopkins, believed our longing to see and experience beauty could lead us to longing for and knowledge of God:

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words-to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. (The Weight of Glory: 42-3).

If glimpses of beauty now are just foretaste and promise of beauty after ashes, what does that require of me now, today?

Lewis believed, in part, that we are called to treat others in the light of future glory:

in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people.

I find myself challenged to see the beauty Baldwin feared would be overlooked: the beauty of people who don’t fit the dominant paradigm, the beauty of the old, the weak, the beauty hidden behind sadness, indifference, anger.

And I find myself challenged to look for and work toward the beauty God saw in this world when he made it: beauty tragically damaged, diminished, dimmed, but never fully destroyed.

And maybe the largest challenge of all: I choose to trust that God, more merciful than I can imagine, will restore and renew beauty, will bring beauty from ashes, will reveal that weight of glory we see only in part in each other and this weary world around us.

Will use our longing for beauty to bring us to the full beauty held so faithfully in store.

O then, weary then why

When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,

Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept

Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder

A care kept. — Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where. —

Yonder. — What high as that! We follow, now we

follow. — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

This is the third in a Lenten series.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

God's Green Grace

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life
and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

(The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry)

I wrote last week about storms and stones,about the unsettling weather we've been having, unsettling headlines and conversations.

In the days since, I've been busy advocating for a moral Pennsylvania budget, one that restores deep funding cuts to education and prioritizes people and communities over the largely unregulated shale gas industry. I've forced myself to learn Twitter. Even worse: forced myself to read proposed budget line-items.

It’s easy to get caught up in the burdens of our day, easy to start the day uneasy, to hurry from appointment to task to challenge, and fall into bed at night still carrying that sense of unease, that feeling of modern malaise.

In the last decade, sociological and scientific research has validated a cure as old as the psalms: time in nature, “green time,” time spent in “the peace of wild things.”

Frances Kuo, a strong advocate of “green time”, published a major study documenting the importance of trees, grass, natural beauty, in calming the heart and easing the mind:

An article in Science Daily summarized the findings:

Access to nature and green environments yields better cognitive functioning, more self-discipline and impulse control, and greater mental health overall.
Less access to nature is linked to exacerbated attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms, higher rates of anxiety disorders, and higher rates of clinical depression.
Greener environments enhance recovery from surgery, enable and support higher levels of physical activity, improve immune system functioning, help diabetics achieve healthier blood glucose levels, and improve functional health status and independent living skills among older adults.
By contrast, environments with less green space are associated with greater rates of childhood obesity; higher rates of 15 out of 24 categories of physician-diagnosed diseases, including cardiovascular diseases; and higher rates of mortality in younger and older adults.

While it is true that richer people tend to have both greater access to nature and better physical health outcomes, the comparisons here show that even among people of the same socioeconomic status, those who have greater access to nature, have better physical health outcomes. Rarely do the scientific findings on any question align so clearly.

I know for myself, in times of stress an hour spent weeding the moss path in my backyard can return me to quiet calm. When I’m angry or troubled, a short bird-watching jaunt around nearby Church Farm pond can shift my focus, realign my priorities, bring unexpected delight.

During my teen years, hovering on the edge of depression, I found myself taking long walks down unknown roads, finding grace and calm in the hills around my home, finding hope in the budding trees, the bright spring flowers, the feel of wind ruffling my hair. In my senior year of high school, during a very dark time, I would sit on the grassy bank of Lake Gleneida, watching the sunlight move across the ripples, finding rest, even joy, in the dance of sparkling water and sudden silky shadow.

Outdoors I have experienced, more times than I can count, the truth of Psalm 23:

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he restores my soul.

I worry about kids who have no experience of green space, who can’t imagine spending an hour outside alone. In youth ministry, camp ministry, scout work, I tried hard to get kids outside, playing Ultimate Frisbee barefoot in the grass, reading under a tree, paddling a kayak on a little mountain pond, sitting around a campfire counting shooting stars.

An amazing grace from my childhood was summers spent at a camp in the Catskllls. I still remember with great thanks the view across the valleys, the green grass of the baseball field sloping down the side of the mountain. I remember sitting by the little hidden waterfall, down across Sutton Road, and feeling the cool of the mist, the soothing song of the water, soaking in the grace of God’s beauty. I’d arrive at camp every summer feeling ragged and a little lost; somewhere along the way, swinging in the sun with the world below my feet, hiking up through the pine grove with whippoorwills calling, I’d notice I was strong again. Happy again. Healthy again.

In Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder , Richard Louv describes the forces that have kept our kids inside, creating a dangerous disconnect between children and the natural world. Our kids would be healthier if they spent more time outside. Their view would be clearer if they spent less time in simulated worlds and more time in the world of seasons, weather, bird song, soaking up God’s green grace.

But the same is true for us as adults. I have neighbors who only come outside to mow the grass and unload their groceries from the car.

I’m reminded of the Gerard Manley Hopkin poem, written more than a century ago.

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.

We are “smeared with toil,” hurrying to get what we need, worrying about many things. Yet, for many of us, a place of refuge is just steps away. God’s grace is there, waiting to fill us, as it filled David, out in the wilderness, on the run for his life. As it filled Elijah, weary and despairing.

I’m puzzled, and saddened, at Christians who seem alarmed at the idea that God can meet us in nature, that He can use his creation to soothe and heal us.

It’s His, right? His gift to us. There’s nothing pantheistic, new age, spiritually dangerous, about finding God’s grace at work in his world.

As David said in Psalm 65:

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders;
where morning dawns, where evening fades,
you call forth songs of joy.

David repeatedly mentioned awe and joy in his experience of nature. When I think of times I’ve spent exploring creation, digging in the dirt with small children, wandering waterways with kids of all ages, celebrating spring in all its glory, awe and joy are the emotions that come to mind: a good foundation for mental health, and a gracious reminder of God and his goodness.

One evening last week I took my kayak and a sandwich to nearby Marsh Creek Lake, paddled up a little bay, then floated as I munched my meal and listened to the Red-winged Blackbirds squawck. A strange call prompted me to paddle closer to the marsh grass, and out flew a young Great-horned Owl. Then another. Then another.

I sat a long time, watching them, three large young birds calling for their dinner.

By the time I paddled back to my car, my heart was full, my mind at rest.

I’m heading outside now – to check what’s blooming, to see what’s happening in the nests around our yard.

I hope you have time outside as well this weekend, and this summer, enjoying God’s green grace.

[This is a revision of a post from 2011. I'll be reworking some earlier posts this summer, as travel and time outside limit my time for blogging.]

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