From time to time in "Reflections", we may comment on a topic to open a broader conversation concerning the relationship of the creative process to prayer, discipleship and relating to God daily through the "eyes of the heart".
For instance, I am learning more each day that through art, we experience a more expansive communication between our Lord and ourselves. To discover Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dostoevsky, John Donne, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Flannery O'Connor, and Van Gogh (to name a scant few), is to discover more of Christ, more beauty, more of the spirit of the heart and soul of man and woman. As Jay Hopler relates, art allows one to confront "two of humankind's most powerful actuations: the drive to create and the drive to know a creator." The same can be said of prayer.
Looking at Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) - he was an Englishman, a member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit) and a poet. Today, he is recognized in the first order for his poetry. Certainly, his poetry is devotional but his genius is widely recognized in both religious and secular circles. He is described as having had an "imposed watchfulness" to detect and communicate, in his words, "news from God". The artist works very hard -- and is compelled -- not to miss these revelations, conversations or inquiries and to communicate through story, images, cadence and arrangement, the mystery of the unseen coming through the seen. Or, as Kimberly Johnson comments with regard to lyrical poetry in particular, "it lends itself well to the consideration of mystery. With their shared interest in plumbing mystery and defining the self in the context of such uncertainty, poetry and religion stand as two sympathetic and oft overlapping responses to the same existential uncertainties."
How many times do we miss out on this deeper reality of God speak because of an imposed "UN- watchfulness"? The world defines for us a narrow reality born out of fear, simplification and ignorance. As description expands and definition limits, the artist helps teach us to reinterpret and recreate a described reality of simplicity, beauty, mystery and love.
Overlooking, then, means that we miss in a day, in an an hour, in a moment the very beauty, actuality, and message that God would arrest us in, if only we were attentive to it. We each have the opportunity in the creation of art or enjoyment of it to celebrate and participate in the incarnate reality of Christ in all things, reminding us that convergences of our attention and God's speaking are gifts of grace and markers of a path. We can say "Yes" to the Creator in the moment of His immanent presence. Practically, just taking the time to read and to "stay with" a poem can help us with this. The same is true of the Scriptures, as they are quite rightly spoken of as the greatest of all literature, including poetry, as well as the Sacred Text, all "inspired" by God himself.
In closing, I want to share one of Hopkins' many poems that has touched me deeply. His poems have encouraged me to embrace prayer creatively and see the artistry of Jesus in the restoring of the human soul, one person at a time. The discipline of not overlooking that one person, or not missing that intersection or convergence in an ordinary day that "catches fire", is aliveness to the active, incarnate love of God in all our circumstances and surroundings.
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
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.
I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. -- Psalm 27:13
Blessings,
Trip