Last week, Bonnie Lebbing shared how contemplative practice has helped her find peace and God’s Presence in the now. This week, parishioner and contemplative practitioner Joy Kleucker offers another classic poem from the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, it’s safe to say, had a contemplative knack for recognizing the Divine presence in the moment, just as it exists around him:

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.