“The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things”:

  Some Reflections on the Holy Spirit -- Sallie McFague

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                        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.

                --Gerard Manley Hopkins

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             We must undergo the deepest of all conversions, the conversion from egocentricism to theocentrism, a conversion to whom we truly are: reflections of God, as is everything in creation.  The only difference between us and the rest of creation is that the others reflect God, tell of God, simply by being, whereas we must will that it be so.  We must desire to be what we truly are—made in the image of God, and thus able to live justly and sustainably on earth with all other creatures.

I.  GOD AND THE WORLD: A SACRAMENTAL SENSIBILITY

            “All things therefore are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow, ring and tell of him” (Hopkins, The Sermons and Devotional Writings [Oxford, 1959], 195).

            Mechthild of Magdeburg: “The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw—and knew I saw—all things in God and God in all things.”

            Augustine: “Therefore, my God, I would not exist at all, unless you were in me; or rather, I would not exist unless I were in you ‘from whom and by whom all things exist….” (Confessions, I.2).

II.  WHO IS God?

            Is God a being, even the highest being, or is God the ground of all that is real, all that exists?  God as a supernatural being with all power vs. God as “the dearest freshness deep down things”—the Spirit, the breath, the ether, in which each and every thing grows and flourishes?

            God as the body of the world is that body by way of all the bodies that compose the universe. The world is “alive” with God—but indirectly, incarnationally. Christian mysticism is incarnational: we become aware of God through the earth, through “double vision”—the ability to see everything as itself and in God, both at the same time. “Everything is God,” God is reality, but only as everything is itself.  God and the world are not in competition: the more God, the more world, and vice versa.

            Reality is “good” or, to say the same thing, God is love. Reality (God) is on the side of life and its fulfillment—this is the “direction” of reality. Cf. the Trinity and ecology. God is the reality of all things; all things become real by living in God.

III. WHO ARE WE?

            “Believing in God” is not primarily asserting that “God exists”; rather, it is acknowledging that we are not our own, that we belong to God  and the earth that—through God--sustains us. Coming to faith is not so much knowing who God is, but who we are. Acknowledging who we are means gratitude and responsibility. Global warming as prime example of our responsibility for planetary health.

IV. WHAT IS OUR TASK?  CARE AND HOPE.

            The threat of dystopia and the need to imagine the possibility.

            Hope lies not in us, but in God: supernatural transcendence vs. immanental transcendence.  God’s sustaining love is closer to us than we are to ourselves.

            Julian of Norwich: “At the same time, he [God] showed me something small, about the size of a hazelnut, that seemed to lie in the palm of my hand as rough as a tiny ball.  I tried to understand the sight of it, wondering what it could possibly mean. The answer came: ‘This is all that is made.’ I felt it was so small that it could easily fade to nothing; but again I was told, ‘This lasts and it will go on lasting forever because God loves it.  And so it is with every being that God loves.’ I saw three properties about this tiny object.  First, God had made it; second, God loves it; and third, God keeps it. And yet what this really means to me, that he is the Maker, the Keeper, the Lover, I cannot begin to tell” (Revelation of Love” [Doubleday Image Books, 1997], 10-11).

            Julian of Norwich: “It was in this way that our Good Lord answered all questions and doubts I might make, comforting me greatly with these words: ‘I may make all things well; I can make all things well, and I will make all things well, and I shall make all things well; and you shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well” (Ibid., 60).

            The story of Jesus Christ: incarnation, cross, resurrection. A story of hope through the worst dystopia: Christmas and Easter—hope and renewal.

            “Nature is never spent” and “there lives the deepest freshness deep down things” because of the sustaining power and love of God, within whom the earth, our bent world, lives.