Issue 16: “God’s Grandeur”
“Beauty is that which draws our attention with wonder and welcome and that ultimately leads us to worship…worship of God in gratitude, humility, and joy…Beauty welcomes us in the sense that it is invitational, vulnerable, and unhurried. It tells us we are wanted in its presence… beauty welcomes our broken parts... [and] leads us to worship by enabling us to live in the real world, the world of trauma and shame and then to see through it [to]... “My Lord and my God!”
God sees us not as problems to be solved or broken objects to be repaired, but as beauty on the way to being formed… We are not primarily primed [neurologically] to look for beauty (sin and evil work to ensure that). But that, in fact is exactly what we were created to do. Evil knows that the day we discover that Jesus is the ultimate embodiment of beauty, it will be in trouble.”
Curt Thompson
WHY POETRY & M25i?
Matthew 25 Initiative exists to equip and sustain Anglicans who are working across justice and mercy organizations and parishes. We see godly, wise, strong practitioners who are called but at times tired, filled with purpose yet lacking ways to recharge. One small way M25i desires to refresh those in the trenches of broken places, is by sharing a well-written poem offering beauty in words and imagery.
Why poetry? All poetry begins with a question—obvious or hidden. It looks at something that is curious, grievous, or mesmerizing. The poet writes and offers readers a specific moment to carefully consider, and if the poet is a master of the written language, they help us purify and refine our common language. Language is so important to preserve and get right, because it’s how we understand, work with, and serve one another.
In the work of justice and mercy, we are threatened with burnout when we lose our ability to see the way things could be. Holding a space for poetry makes way for prophetic imagination, or a way of thinking about what needs mending. When we pay careful attention to a poem in a community, we learn to pay closer attention together and to one another.
“Roughly 33% of the Bible is poetry, including songs, reflective poetry, and the passionate, politically resistant poetry of the prophets” (Biblical Poetry, The Bible Project)
Join us as we allow poetry to help shape us, giving us space to deal with our grief, hold back cynicism, and hold onto tenderness. In the space of words carefully chosen and edited down to only what you need, we train ourselves to see moments more clearly, and more fully.
God's Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.
Gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.
Proverbs 16:24
