The Grandeur of God

The last few weeks I’ve been thinking about the poem God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins was a priest and poet who lived in England and Ireland and wrote during the late 1800s.

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 of 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 first line of the poem ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God’ reminds me of the opening of Psalm 19 ‘The heavens declare the glory of God.’ These days, it feels like the trees are declaring God’s glory, charged with God’s grandeur in their bright and vivid colors.

 

The part about gathering ‘to a greatness like the ooze of oil crushed’ reminds me of some of the ancient olive oil presses we saw in Israel last spring, and also of the lines from Isaiah 53 quoted in the Messiah, ‘he was bruised for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.’ God’s glory displayed in beauty and also in the suffering love of Jesus.

‘Reck’ is short for recognize, and the poet asks, ‘why do people not recognize God’s kingdom (rod)?’ And laments the way humanity has both harmed and disconnected from the created world.

 

The poem next shifts to celebrating the ways God’s love sustains the world. The line about ‘the dearest freshest deep down things’ – makes me think of the carrots Jay and Peter planted at church this summer that we’ve been harvesting these days, pulling and digging them out from the dirt.

 

But it’s actually the final image has been on my mind the most - of dawn and the Holy Spirit as a dove, brooding over the bent world. The promise of morning coming. The Spirit still hovering over the chaos, tenderly caring for our broken world.