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Spiritual Sunday
Since both last Sunday’s Gospel reading and today’s mention the moment when the Holy Spirit, like a dove, enters Jesus, I share today the greatest of all poems using that metaphor. But to set you up for it, here’s a portion of today’s lesson:
And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” draws on images of industrialization to capture a “bent” world that has lost its way. By contrast, the poet depicts God’s grace through images of nature in all its freshness. Then, at the climactic moment, this grace is compared to a dove, which both sustains us and lifts us up.
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 off 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.
