A Year With Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ: 'Creation Is A Symphony of the Holy Spirit'

Saturday, May 12, 2012

'Creation Is A Symphony of the Holy Spirit'

`A Strain of Music from a Straw'

Excerpt:

Pope Benedict XVI has inscribed Hildegard of Bingen (1089-1179) in “the catalogue of saints.” St. Hildegard was an enormously accomplished woman, a German Benedictine mystic and abbess who wrote books of theology, botany and medicine, as well as letters, poems and liturgical songs, and invented her own alphabet and language, Lingua Ignota . She wrote at least seventy musical compositions, including the earliest surviving morality play, Ordo Virtutum. In Great Christian Thinkers: From the Early Church through the Middle Ages (Fortress Press, 2011), the Pope writes:

“For her, the entire creation is a symphony of the Holy Spirit, who is in himself joy and jubilation.”

Hildegard judged herself merely a channel for divine music rather than its composer.....

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Citings:

Unless otherwise specified, I will use the following:
Catherine Phillips (ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, Oxford’s World Classics, 2009
The Image Source:
Study of rocks and ferns in a wood at Crossmount, Perthsire, 1843
http://goldenagepaintings.blogspot.com/2008/02/john-ruskin-contd.html
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his to the Father through the features of men's faces. ~Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

In verse commemorating Lorca's death, Roy Campbell wrote,

Not only did he lose his life

By shots assassinated:

But with a hammer and a knife

Was after that -- translated.^[48]

Hopkins has faced the same posthumous ‘translation’ nightmares as Lorca.

Saint Claude de La Colombière||Saint of Hope

"O my God, in my very confidence lies all my hope. "For Thou, O Lord, singularly has settled me in hope." This confidence can never be in vain. "No one has hoped in the Lord and has been confounded."
=========
From the meditation today in Magnificat: "The rich man is condemned not because he is rich, but because he never even saw Lazarus at his gate."-(father John R Donahue,SJ)

Ora pro nobis, Fr Ciszek--Ar Hyd y Nos
http://newsaints.faithweb.com/index.htm

Our Lady of the 'Pomegranate'

Pinturicchio, Virgin and Child with St John, Altarpiece of Santa Maria dei Fossi-About.com Art History

Ars Poetica

Notes on the Art of Poetry

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on
in the world between the covers of books,
such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,
such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,
such and so many blinding bright lights,
splashing all over the pages
in a million bits and pieces
all of which were words, words, words,
and each of which were alive forever
in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

~ Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), Welsh poet

I have always contended in talking to missionaries that we are not so much to bring Christ to peoples as we are to bring Christ out of them…Christ is hidden in all world religions, though as yet His face is veiled as it was to Moses, who asked to see it. ~Fr. Louis OCSO [Thomas Merton]

I could say this of the poets Lorca, Campbell, Merton and Hopkins:

…Born in the black aurora of disaster,
Can look a common soldier in the face:
I find a comrade where I sought a master :
For daily, while the stinking crocodiles
Glide from the mangroves on the swampy shore,
He shares my awning on the dhow, he smiles,
And tells me that he lived it all before.
Through fire and shipwreck, pestilence and loss,
Led by the ignis fatuus of duty
To a dog’s death — yet of his sorrows king —
He shouldered high his voluntary Cross,
Wrestled his hardships into forms of beauty,
And taught his gorgon destinies to sing. ~Roy Campbell, Luis de Camões