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Good Morning

My favourite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, was born on this day in 1844. He was a Victorian, a Jesuit priest, a man who battled depression; his poetry broke the rules of syntax and word formation to create a unique music.  His life is distant from mine in time and kind, but ever since I first read him as a teenager, his voice has sounded near and familiar.

There’s something contemporary about the tensions in his poetry -   between faith and doubt, joy and darkness -  and in how he reveals his personal struggles.  Here’s how he describes despair.  ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief’ – ‘O the mind, mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall frightful’.    He lives in the darkest place where God cannot reach him:  ‘Comforter, where, where is your comforting?  Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?’

His poetry speaks to me because he’s a believer who is truthful about how hard it can be to believe.He writes about not being able to find God.  But, when he does see, the light of his joy is scintillating.  In the mystery of the created universe, he feels the goodness and beauty of the divine.  God breaks through in the flick of a bird’s wing, or the shine of a ploughed field.  Each thing speaks out its unique, created self.  ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’ he writes. ‘It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.’  That’s his inspiration, his comfort.

Life-giving, light-making God  -  in this moment of early morning, may we sense you by whatever way comes closest to us.  And recognize you in the faces and places we meet today. Amen