A Year With Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ: July 2013

Sunday, July 21, 2013

I Grasp God’s Garment in the Void

I Grasp God’s Garment in the Void
Excerpt:
...Levertov, Dana Greene says, saw herself as a pilgrim in exile or living on the borderland. This was in part because of her parents: her mother was Welsh, her father a Hassidic Jew from Russia who converted to Christianity. Dana says that, although Levertov announced early in life that she was an agnostic, she was influenced by her father’s Hassidic roots and inspired by a copy of Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim that he gave her. As a result, she saw divine sparks of God everywhere and talked about poems as temples and herself as a poet priest. She saw a deep connection between prayer and poetry, noting that they run on parallel tracks and grow out of solitude and quiet.
Note how her poem “Suspended” functions as a kind of prayer:
SUSPENDED
I had grasped God’s garment in the void
But my hand slipped...

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."
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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