St. John of the Cross distills the foundation and entire dynamism of the spiritual life into one cry of the heart:
“Where have you hidden?”
We recall that first precious encounter in John’s Gospel, pregnant with meaning and mystery:
“What do you seek?”
“Rabbi, where do you dwell?”
For the heart that is awake, this question burns like a fire within. It cannot cease insisting: “Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His appearing is as sure as the dawn.” (Hosea 6:3). “Have you seen Him Whom my soul loves?” (Song 3:3).
Gerard Manley Hopkins had such a heart. A brilliant Oxford poet full of expectation, Hopkins’ life radically changed under the weight of God’s love. He was received into the Catholic Church by St. John Henry Newman in 1866. He burned his poems, took the Jesuit habit and devoted himself to the ascetical life. It was only years later, at the direction of his superior, that Hopkins again took up his pen, and the grace that poured forth from his lips shocked the world and shocks us still. His works bear a somewhat sacramental force; they are prayers, receptacles of grace. Most were only written for God’s eyes. They were only published after his early death.
I have chosen the name for this column from one such of these poems: “God’s Grandeur.” It is a marvelous piece that charges the reader to take heart and dig beneath the surface of things to find the Spirit of God, like a living stream hidden beneath the crust: “the dearest freshness deep down things.” The poem incarnates the vibrant faith of a man who could see, with a pure heart, God–the living God–vivid in every moment. Hopkins teaches us to crush this world and find (my God!) grace oozing and moving us.
Hopkins wrote when God’s presence in nature was being smeared over. We now live in an age when God’s presence is everywhere eclipsed. His poem is hope: that even in such a time as this, the daystar can rise in our hearts. That even now the Holy Ghost broods over this bent world, gathering us as a mother hen, and we can feel His warm breast still beating beneath.
One thinks also of the simple yet irresistible testimony in our complex age from Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection who, gazing on a tree stripped of its leaves and waiting for the spring, was so wounded by the grandeur of God that he set out for a monastery that same day.
The Father seeks hearts such as these, who allow themselves to be moved, who “vibrate at the Spirit’s touch” (St. John Paul II, “Novo Millenio,” 33).
So I offer this column to the patronage of those simple souls who saw God every day. May they teach us again to feel what Chesterton called “the ancient instinct of astonishment.”
May they teach us to thirst–and then teach us to drink.