A Six-Pack of Containment Considerations BONUS: Recking the Wreck

Many of you know my devotion to Jesuit priest/poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. His magnum opus, the "Wreck of the Deutschland," seems to epitomize his faith, his ministry, his life.

For all the joy points of his life, and for all his virtues and talents, Hopkins labored under an incessant  sense of futility. Disappointment from family; struggles in belief and experience of God's Presence; lackluster performance as a teacher and curate: these befell him and no doubt finally felled him, even if typhoid appeared on his death certificate.

He, too, was a fatality from a plague that was besieging Dublin in the late 1880s. Perhaps a coincidental detail, but not entirely.

Physical maladies are to some degree evidence of spiritual maladies. Sickness and death are consequences of sin. Now mental illness is not a personal fault, as if there were a direct correlation between "who sinned, this man or his parents?" and his plight (cf. Jn 9:2). They are, however, realities that as such are related causally. Even so, sometimes sins can catalyze conditions, as in the contribution of abuse or combat to PTSD.

By all accounts, Hopkins lived if not a charmed life, then certainly a comfortable one. The causes of his personal plague are, as for many of us, mysterious. Even if he knew their origin, daily decisions did not desist, and he attended to them carefully and heartfully. As with many artists, his art emerged through the rolls of his mental and emotional wringer, or at least it was in his soap.

Hopkins wrote considerably in his youth, winning a school prize for one poem, "The Escorial." Entry into the Catholic Faith, and soon into the Society of Jesus, convinced Hopkins he needed to set aside childish things (cf. 1 Cor 13:11) by burning his poetry and resting his quill.

Only after his Jesuit superior suggested that a poem be written about a recent nautical disaster did Hopkins (cue the Rocky theme) return to training, to retell a fight not in his beleaguered brain, but "in wind's burly and beat of endragonèd seas" (Wreck, 27).

In the manner that God brings forth good from evil, Hopkins' shipwreck reckoning won him a second wind, which lasted the rest of his harrowed days. Hopkins' interior torments and physical problems were the shipwrack that yielded a harvest of poetry, the "tempest [that] carr[ied] the grain" for God to us.

Storm-as-salvation, or salvation-through-storm, reflects the tension of opposites, much the work and play of Catholic theology and spirituality. No poem of Hopkins, I suggest, demonstrates this more starkly than "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

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Hopkins experienced his own conversion to Roman Catholicism as a turmoil in the first several stanzas. God is "giver of breath and bread," all things needful, but He seems to jilt as to Job. "Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, / And after it almost unmade, what with dread, / Thy doing" (1).

Nobody forced him, but the forces within him were wild weather: "the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress" (2). There was nowhere else to turn except to the Eucharistic Lord Himself, and there he thrusted himself as a graceful pigeon to its destination (3).

"Mined with a motion" (4) was the title of a book that analyzed themes in Hopkins' poetic corpus. Not one whit witless, his words achieved their aim, precisely because his aim was Truth: the truth of his perceptions and experiences, yes, but above all Christ, the Way, Truth, and Life (Jn 14:6).

This truth is evident to one who seeks and "sifts" it from life's storms and assertions. "Since, tho' he is under the world's splendour and wonder, / His mystery must be instressed, stressed" (5). These last two words are Hopkins coinages: "instress" is the force that an image ("inscape") exerts upon the mind, to which the mind must apply itself ("stress") as vigorous teeth to a Red Delicious. God is dreadfully evident everywhere, but not without purposeful sensory and spiritual effort.

The mystery of God-Evident originates not in the magnificent mysteries we celebrate today, lamentably via-satellite for most, although the initial kerygma (apostolic proclamation of Christ)  might try to convince us otherwise. What would have been the first thing on their minds? He is risen! This itinerant preacher ("going in Galilee") originated not only in the embrace of Father in the Holy Spirit, but in the "Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey; / Manger, maiden's knee;" (7).

Death and life commingle in every aspect of the God-Man's earthly sojourn, and in everyone else's. Our trials can move us, as they moved Hopkins, "To hero of Calvary, Christ,'s feet--" with a certain felt inevitability: "Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it--men go" (8).

Human hardships contain a salvific purpose, a literal salve (both in the English sense of healing and in its Latin root, the salutation made to Mary in the eponymous "Hail, Holy Queen." But herein lies the tension: divine purification presents as both "lightning and love...a winter and warm"; its Origin, a "Father and fondler of heart...hast wrung," at once producing obscurity and mercy (9).

God's purpose for us at every turn is our turning to Him, our conversion. He can accomplish this, according to Hopkins, after the striking strides of Saint Paul, or the waiting-working of Saint Augustine; either way, mercy and mastery "in all of us, out of us" are His objective (10).

Conversion and its sibling repentance are many-faceted, but in every respect a death. Though, like its sibling suffering, physical death is the consequence of original sin, it was meant to be the fire that welded a soul to its Fatherly Frame.

Death personified reads off a catalog of options (usually his, not ours): a sword, a flange (think the loose ligature on the space shuttle Challenger), a rail[road] accident, a beast's fang or a flood. There are more prevalent counterparts, such as the COVID Operation currently underway.

The time for perceived invincibility is long past. Our clever cloth masks are no firm prophylactic against a virus, though we may wear them to an optional outing. "But wé dréam we are rooted in earth--Dust!" There is little room for foolhardiness, for "Flesh falls within sight of us": every day the death toll climbs. Who among us is exempt from the reaper's swing? (11)

"Wreck" goes on to describe the details of the occasion: the passengers (12), the outset (13), and the impact both physical and spiritual (14ff), on the passengers and upon Hopkins himself as one who heard the news from an admittedly comfortable remove (24).

Several aspects merit Hopkins' attention: an heroic but fatal rescue attempt (16); the number five referring to both the nuns and to Our Lord's wounds (22); one nun's bold invitation for Christ to "come quickly" (24); the primacy of ordinary life ("the jading and jar of the cart"; 27) as the venue for spiritual insights and growth.

Christ came for salvation, much the need for Germany, which had far less to boast with Luther than with St. Gertrude (20). Salvation extended more intimately, in Hopkins' hopes, to the religious renegades of his native England. Just as St. Peter discerned the gruesome gravity of God ("the unshapeable shock night"), Hopkins noticed the poignant celebration surrounding this wreck, namely Mary's Immaculate Conception (it happened the day before that Solemnity).

This was all God's work, and Hopkins apprehended this after enough rumination on secondary points. "He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her" (28), and the nun's candid confession, he prayed, could help his own people repent and be converted, thus rendering this shipwrack a harvest (31).

God is in control (32). Harshly or gently, He wields the sword of mercy, swinging it even in the direction of the dead and the near-dead (33). Could that sword touch and "royally reclaim his own" British hearts? Everyone else's?

If so, it would happen as everything else has: in the tension of opposites: "kind, but royally reclaiming his own; a released shower...not a lightning of fire" (34).

The final stanza sums it up with the intensity of the last strains of Ravel's Bolero. The cavalcade of consonants, the arabesque litany spelling out the One Who fain would remember English souls all the way back to Himself.

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