A life in letters: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

From the moment I came across them during my university English classes, I loved the writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet. I loved his extravagant use of language and wild rhythms in his passionate poems about the beauties of nature. 

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
   dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dáwn-drawn Falcon

Like I million other teenagers I tried to imitate Hopkins’s style, although to be frank I found much of his work and the aesthetic theory behind it difficult to understand.

At that stage I particularly empathised with the depressive melancholy which shadowed his life, and was especially moved by To R.B. a poem in which he sadly expresses his sense of desertion by the creative flame.  He explains his longing for ‘the one rapture of an inspiration’, and its absence as the reason why his friend Robert Bridges to whom the poem was addressed may have missed ‘in these lagging lines…..the roll, the rise the carol, the creation.’ These are words which are all the more poignant to those of us who also seek the same touch of rapture since despite – or perhaps even because of – Hopkins’  pain and sense of failure, he was still able to write divinely.

I remember concluding a sermon with another quotation from Hopkins which meant much to me at the end of a difficult day preaching at Hamilton Baptist Church in the summer of 1986. It was at the time  I’d become convinced that I was called to be a Baptist minister and that to make this possible God would somehow work a miracle and evaporate my phobia of standing in front of an audience. I applied as a candidate for the ministry to the Baptist Union of Scotland, and started learning New Testament Greek. But far from diminishing, the stress levels progressively increased.

That Sunday, I drove to Hamilton in complete terror. As the church secretary and I prayed before the service, I was wracked with the usual panic, unsure whether I’d be able to survive the hour ahead. And then I walked out into the pulpit where the little sign in old-fashioned lettering, visible only to the person leading the service, quoted words from the book of Acts  - ‘Sirs, we would see Jesus.’  What kind of crucifixion would they see that morning?

I don’t know how I made it through the service. I was in perpetual fear that I’d collapse in panic, or burst into an uncontrollable tirade of gibberish and obscenity. Word after word, sentence after sentence, I tried desperately to focus on the present moment, simply to survive, second by second. It did not, I imagine, make for particularly edifying preaching.

In the evening I, and the congregation, were back for more. I was preaching about the Christian understanding of suffering, particularly of depression. About half-way through the service I realised I might actually make it to the end without collapsing, and my mood lightened.

I finished the sermon by quoting the opening lines of Hopkins’ masterpiece The Wreck of the Deutschland, a poem in which he draws parallel between a recent shipwreck and the courage and faith demonstrated by one of a group of nuns who were on board and his own experience of faith tested by trauma and pain.  He begins with a description of how God the creator who ‘hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh’ subsequently subjected him to an experience so severe that he was ‘almost unmade’. And then he says ‘dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.’ I quoted those words, and suggested to the congregation that despite the intensity of our pain and darkness the time will come when God will say ‘Enough!’, and once again we will experience God’s healing intervention. 

I don’t think I felt the touch of the divine finger that night at Hamilton. There was simply relief that I had survived. But the hope was there, no matter how apparently irrational it might seem, that one day the cloud would lift and God’s touch would be tangible.

Much later in life, when my depression and anxiety was being treated by effective medication and I had been blessed on the journey in ways I had never imagined that Sunday evening Hopkins continued to speak to me.

There’s a line near the end of The Wreck of the Deutschland which I have consistently found an encouragement and inspiration. Hopkins writes of Christ:

Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east

And then there are lines depicting the universe as the garment of God, and God’s engagement with creation and God’s self-expression through human beings. I do not think I have encountered anywhere else these truths expressed with such captivating power:

…the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings 
(From God’s grandeur)

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. 
(From ‘As kingfishers catch fire’)

I have journeyed from a point where Christianity seemed to me to be mostly about using your mind to understand facts about God and ‘correct’ theology to a place where I realize that the imagination matters – for through it God speaks powerfully to you, reaching parts which ideas alone cannot touch, and through it you respond to God in creative ways.  Gerard Manley Hopkins, this great poet, this great angst-ridden Christian has partnered me both in my struggles with sadness and in God’s awakening of my imagination.