Spring and Fall

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves like the things of man, you 

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? 

Ah, as the heart grows older 

It will come to such sights colder 

By and by, nor spare a sigh 

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal* lie**;

And yet you will weep and know why***.

Now no matter, child, the name: 

Sorrows springs are the same. 

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed, 

What heart heard of, ghost guessed****: 

It was the blight man was born for.

It is Margaret you mourn for. ---Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1880 

"Leafmeal"; akin to "piecemeal", a work coined by Hopkins **although Margaret might someday see a whole LOT ('worlds') of leaves laying around decaying, ***when she someday does, she will know why it moves her: the decay of leaves triggers thoughts of her own mortality ****before she had expressed it or heard it expressed, Margaret's own inner spirit knew the truth of this

FALL

I'm waiting for fall to come:
For leaves to fall,
For mists to blow,
For winds to call,
For birds to go,
And then I'll know it's fall.

---Anonymous [makes the elementary school rounds]

4th of July Canyon, New Mexico

The Dirty Floor

[This is technically an analogy. Like all, it has its limitations.]

    Sometimes people ask me, "Why do you consider Christianity so special or unique? After all, most of the world's great religions have fine moral codes." (Of course, these people are either not Christians at all or very loose or lapsed in their relationship to Him.) So I agree with them that that is true, but the primary thing about Christianity is not the fine moral code.

     I give them this to think on:"When you were very young and tracked dirt in on the nice, clean kitchen floor, how did your mom react? Did she say, 'That's okay, honey, I love you so much that I'll ignore the dirt. We'll all just get along fine ignoring it.'???" Of course not!" [No one's ever said "Yes" to this---what a dump you'd live in if your mom were like that.] "

     "And your mom knew you couldn't clean up the mess on your own. So, what did your mom do? She rolled up her sleeves* and cleaned up your mess on her own.""That's how it is with God and sin. God can even less stand to live with the dirt of sinfulness than your mom could with that dirty floor. [Old Testament: 'unclean' was how they often expressed sin or sinfulness.] God is so holy He can't even stand one speck of dirt in His presence---not the tiniest thing. And we're not capable of cleaning our mess up, either. So, God 'rolled up His sleeves'*, became one of us (Jesus Christ) and cleaned up that mess (dying on the cross to pay back Himself for the cost of our sins). "If you grasp this idea first, then nature really properly can become a teaching tool for you. Because then you will know what is real, and you can relate what you take in with your senses back to the truth of Jesus Christ.

  

*"[Yahweh] saw that there was no one. . . to intercede; so His own arm worked salvation for Him." (Isaiah 60:16)

No Separation

For I have become persuaded that
OO-tuh THAHN-ah-toss OO-tuh zow-AY
(Neither death nor life)
OO-tuh AHNG-ell-oy Oh-tuh arCH-EYE
(Neither angels nor principalities)
OO-tuh en-es-TOW-tah OO-tuh MELL-on-tah
(Neither things present nor things to come)
OO-tuh dy-NA-mice
(Nor, yet, powers),
OO-tuh HYPS-oh-mah OO-tuh BATH-oss
(Neither height nor depth)
OO-tuh tiss KTISS-iss hett-AIR-ah
(Nor, yet, any other created thing)
Shall be able to separate us from the Love of God
Which is in Christ Jesus, Our Lord.
---St. Paul, Romans 8: 38-39

Technorati Labels Bible Jesus God theology love nature religion poetry Saint Paul

Joyful, Joyful We Adore You

Joyful, joyful, we adore You, 

God of glory, Lord of love; 

Make us bloom like flow'rs before You, 

Opening to our Sun* above. 

Melt the clouds of sin and sadness; 

Drive despair and gloom away; 

Giver of immortal gladness, 

Fill us with the light of day! 

African Daisies & Snapdragons

All Your works with joy surround You, 

Earth and heaven reflect Your rays, 

Stars and angels sing around You, 

Center of unbroken praise. 

Field and forest, vale and mountain, 

Flow'ring meadow, cooling dew, 

Singing bird and flowing fountain 

Call us to rejoice in You. 

You are giving and forgiving, 

Ever blessing, ever blessed, 

Wellspring of the joy of living, 

Ocean depth of happy rest! 

God our Father, Christ our Brother, 

With the Holy Spirit One; 

Teach us how to love each other, 

Selflessly as You have done. 

 Mortals, join the happy chorus, 

Which the morning stars began; 

Father love is reigning o’er us, 

Christian love binds man to man. 

Ever singing, march we onward, 

Victors in the midst of strife, 

Joyful music leads us onward 

In the triumph song of life. 

---Henry van Dyke, 1907, 1911; adapted cmb 1990, 2007 

*Often a metaphor for Jesus "the 'Sun' of Righteousness; the 'Son' of God (Malachi)

Secrets

The skies can't keep their secret!
They tell it to the hills---
The hills just tell the orchards---
And they the daffodils!

A bird, by chance, that goes that way
Soft overheard the whole.
If I should bribe the little bird,
Who knows but she would tell?

I think I won't, however,
It's finer not to know;
If summer were an axiom*,
What sorcery had snow?**

So keep your secret, Father!
I would not, if I could,
Know what the sapphire fellows do,
In Your new-fashioned world!***
---Emily Dickinson

*Axiom--a generally accepted truth, a universal wisdom
**If summer seems like a spiritual teacher & I think I learn all from it, what power does winter have to show me anything?
***I'd rather be surprised by what purpose everything will have in heaven than to try and understand all that now in this life

Technorati Labels Emily Dickinson God eternity hope nature religion poetry literature summer season birds flowers

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 (1)?
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(2).

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 (3)
World broods (4) with warm breast
                 and with ah! bright wings (5).

---Gerard Manley Hopkins, , 1877
(1) Psalm 2:9. Jesus wields a rod to smash prideful kings.
(2) Shod feet. The loss of pristine innocence, the need to be clothed after sin entered the world.(3) Bent world. (a) tired (b) bent but not broken; crooked, inperfect (c) curved, as an egg over which the Spirit broods
(4) Brooding of the Holy Spirit---see Genesis 1.
(5) As one turns from the dark west horizon (earth's tiredness, coming as a result of man's sin) back to the eastern horizon, where the sun is rising, he sees the promise of a new day under the Spirit's care. This borrows from the Bible's Dove symbolism (breast and wings), which are bright and colorful as the beautiful sunrise.

The Spirit "brooded over the waters", in a sense, at Jesus' baptism, also.  In choosing colors for these, I was mindful that the Jordan River is muddy & turgid, but I also wanted it to still look like "water" to the casual observer. Due to the way the 2nd picture drew the Holy Spirit coming, I made a choice to have rainbow-like light below Him.  This also reminded me of the "ah! bright wings" of Hopkins' poem.

Though the second picture has more "immature" art, one thing is more accurate:  the Holy Spirit and the voice came after Jesus had come back up out of the water.  The art in this photo, for whatever reasons, is either sunrise or sunset.  (The time of day isn't mentioned in the Bible.)  But it does remind the observer of Hopkins' allusion to sunrise in his poem.