I keep coming back to the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Recently, I’ve been reading “Spring and Fall,” and “Carrion Comfort.” Today, I found his “Thee, God, I come from, to thee go,” which I had read several times before. It isn’t one of Hopkins’ better poems, but I’m nonetheless mesmerized by the lines,
“What I know of thee I bless/as acknowleding thy stress/on my being…”
This is the confession of a man who has what Eugene Peterson calls “the-fear-of-the-Lord.” Hopkins knew (and how much better does he know it now!) the relentless, inescapable goodness of God. He knew what we all have to come to know: only by “stress on my being” can Love love us into life. Now, this “stress” comes to us in the course of our everyday lives, through “natural” and “ordinary” events. Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t believe everything that happens to me happens because God ordained, or even allowed, it. Much of the suffering in my life is, I believe, contrary to what God wants for me. And I believe God suffers with and for me in such times. Nonetheless, I do believe God is capable and willing to creatively redeem anything I might suffer, no matter how severe. I believe if I will learn to see rightly, then I’ll discover the very comfort Hopkins found: the “stress” I feel is in fact the steady pressure of an Artist’s hand.
