My ear was like a fragment of stained glass...

Photo: Heather King

I recently collected and posted some of my fall entries under the title Reflections of a Sacramental Nature. Of late I've been much taken with the sacramentality of the world around us - and within us.

At Shirt of Flame, a recent Link of the Day on this page, Heather King posts on an early morning experience of the sun, Fire Ear, with a beautiful connection to Psalm 139.

Heather's post brought me to prayer and my prayer led me to look again at Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem:

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.



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