Sunday night turned was poetry night at Circle of Hope’s 7pm meeting on Marlton Pike in Pennsauken. Joyce Fazio and a team led us to consider how poetry can tap us into a deeper connection with ourselves and reality.
Words! “Words are a super power,” Scott Sorrentino said. Jesus, in John 1 is named the Word, the Logos. God incarnate was and is the Word–the organizing logic, the naming of all things, the content of everything, the initial act, the speech coming from the Source and the Source spoken–yes, the Word. And we have words. And we too can name, and speak, and reason, and act.
We can word too.
We are word-ing when we meet together with Jesus.
Then for sure, yes,
Certainly then, at least,
If not always, but then, yes,
when we are with Him so purposefully.
I love birds because they can fly. I cannot fly but when I discovered Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem, the Windhover, I thought that my ability to word could come closer to flying than I had previously realized. In this poem, Hopkins names the thing I longed for in flight more skillfully than I may ever achieve. He writes about a flying bird and marvels at “the achieve of, the mastery of the thing” in a way that made me marvel at his own “achieve of, the mastery of the thing.” His word-ing of flying demonstrated mastery in two directions. I wanted to share it with you (I had to).
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Hopkins gets to the title of this blog post in the last three lines. He describes in great detail the moment that stirred his heart; when he noticed the Windhover, or
kestrel, and intensely enjoyed it for what it was. The naming of its beauty intensified it. Realy experiencing beauty may be as much naming it as perceiving it. Words make reality more real, if only because they are shared, and maybe only with your self-same ears is enough. Like praying out loud when you’re alone.
Word-ing is worth the time and energy (maybe all time and energy). There is so much hidden, unnamed beauty. We could spend our lives looking for it and never find it all (thank God). “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” Hopkins says in
another of his famous poems .The stirring of our hearts is just the occasion of our knowing and engaging fully with what is always infinitely present. It’s “no wonder” this bird so enchants him, because even dirt is shiny beautiful when turned out of the packed field (sillion is a very rare, old word for the mound made by dirt turned up by a plow). And because even wood turning to ash dies in flamboyant brightness. There is so much beauty to see and to name.
We gather on Sundays to see it and name it together, among other things. Hope to see you there soon.
Today, if you hear his voice 