Surrounded by wonders

Welcome to Celebrations 2008

“God’s Grandeur,” the poem printed obelow, was written in 1877 by English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who had converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism about 10 years earlier. Writing during the early stages of the industrial revolution, Hopkins had a sense of a transcendent spiritual power that imbues nature and the heedless destruction that industrialism and materialism can wreak upon it.

More than 100 years later, both aspects of this vision are still with us. At least in areas like ours, the well of refreshment from which Hopkins drank remains available. But areas like ours are becoming increasingly rare, and they are all threatened, as we are, with the relentless pressure of population growth, combined with humankind’s increasing appetite for energy and goods.

For this year’s holiday features, we have chosen to celebrate in photograph and verse the precious but fragile blessing of our natural surroundings. The themes for the next five weeks will be “Farm and Field,” “Forest,” “Country Roads,” “River” and “All Creatures Great and Small.” Each one is represented in one of the photos on this week’s front page.

In this celebration, we hope both to inspire in our readers the sense of awe and wonder for something greater than ourselves that Hopkins saw in the natural world about him, and remind them that when we preserve the natural environment, we preserve, along with our physical and economic wellbeing, a wellspring for our heart and spirit.

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 eastwards, springs—

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.