"For the fulhede of joy is to beholden God in al."

– Julian, XXXV

(the fullness of joy is to see God in all things)

The Jesuit priest, Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-89), knew how to see the
fingerprints of His Creator: "The world is charged with the grandeur of
God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil …" Every
where he looked he saw reminders of his God: "Glory be to God for dappled
things – / For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles in all
stipple upon trout that swim; / …. / All things counter, original, spare,
strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) / With swift, slow;
sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; / He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:/
Praise Him." The truth is reflected also in the faces of humanity: "I
say more: the just man justices; / Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings
graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – / Christ
– for 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."

"Thee God, I come from, to thee go, / All day long I like a fountain
flow / From thy hand out, swayed about / Mote-like in thy mighty glow."

Even in the tragic, Hopkins could see God at work. He prefaces his
"Wreck of the Deutschland" with "To the happy memory of five
Franciscan nuns … drowned between midnight and morning …". In
the poem he writes of the tension we have in this seeing of God: "Thou art
lightning and love, I found it, winter and warm; / Father and fondler of heart
thou hast wrung." Like Julian, Hopkins does not pretend that seeing God in
all things will always be easy, in "Justus quidem tu es …" he
asks: "Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must / Disappointment
all I endeavour end? / Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend / How wouldst thou
worst, I wonder, than thou dost / … Mine, O thou lord of life, send my
roots rain." In "Carrion Comfort" he cries out like David in
Psalm 22: "But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me / Thy
wring-world right foot rock lay a lionlimb against me?"

And yet, while struggling for a meaning he still sees the Hand, as he says in
the "… Deutschland": "is the shipwreck then a harvest, /
does tempest carry the grain for thee? …. Death with a sovereignty that
heeds but hides, bodes but abides." The poem ends with a sense of triumph
– even in the tragedy the King is "Kind, but royally reclaiming his
own."

In Chapter 35 Julian speaks of the way in which evil, though never
"worthwhile" or encouraged by God, nevertheless has the advantage of
showing us our need for God’s mercy and love. She looks forward to a day
when "all will have been brought to righteousness." But in the
meantime sees God at work not just in the joyous moments (though there are
"many, many" of these), but also in those times when we need to cry
out for mercy and grace. "The soul that by grace wisely considers both
[times of joy and the need for mercy] is well satisfied, and delights in them
forever."

Jude and Doc Martin (JaM) de
Graaf   <><