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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Morning, Midday, and Evening Sacrifice

Everything beautiful and noble about us, God has given and we are meant to return to Him in praise. 

The Handsome Heart

God's grace inspired a young boy to agree to whatever his father wanted to give him. I wish I had been as agreeable in the grocery store.

My Own Heart Let Me Have More Pity On

Hopkins left comfort root-room for a change with this one. "Let joy size / At God knows when to God knows what" suggests he wants to adopt the divine perspective toward his life.

Joy is one of the "Fruits of the Holy Spirit" in Galatians 5; fellow Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called it "the infallible sign of the presence of God."

The Shipwrack-Harvest on YouTube

I don’t know what took me so long to make YouTube recordings of GMH, but here is a link to my first playlist of same. A work in progress: recordings seem to emerge almost daily in this springtime of activity.

Regarding quality: I don’t claim to be good, only interested.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhYlit7QTcymEIW0jljEPgL8VrkyQahnm

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As Kingfishers Catch Fire is the first poem I have chosen to recite on my podcast.

It's the first Hopkins poem I remember hearing cited (in part), at the ordination of several transitional deacons. Auxiliary Bishop of Washington Gordon Bennett, S.J., the ordaining prelate, preached the last three lines of this swell sonnet: "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."

Drawing upon the philosophy of Blessed John Duns Scotus, Hopkins appreciated the haecceitas, or individuality ("this-ness") of created realities. Each one of those ten thousands slays in its own way, or indeed Christ slays through them. (I know it's "plays" and not "slays"; I just wanted to use the latter term while it's still in the Youthvocabulary.)

Somewhere I read about the bell-like quality of the following:

"Like each tucked string tells, each
<hung
>bell's /
<bow
>swung
<finds
>tongue--"

In one of his sermons, Hopkins defines grace as "any action, activity, on God's part by which, in creating or after creating, he carries the creature to or towards the end of its being, which is its selfsacrifice to God and its salvation."

The preceding definition is found in the poem notes in Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, one of the sources I shall cite frequently.

Here Hopkins echoes a saying of St. Catharine of Siena that appeals to modern ears: "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire."

Kingfishers and dragonflies can't help but be what they are, but we can. The same grace of God impels us all, but our cooperation with that grace is necessary and noble.

Time for a Podcast

I started this blog some years ago as a place to inspire, inform, and entertain. Its name, "The Shipwrack-Harvest," is a reference from Gerard Manley Hopkins' ode "The Wreck of the Deutschland."

In the worst of this 1875 disaster, five nuns exiled for their Catholic faith started crying out for Christ to come quickly to their rescue, whether as transport-to-shore or death. Hopkins wondered whether the nuns' plea could serve as an intercession for souls to return to Christ.

is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee? 

Incidentally that's why this blog is spelled ship"wrAck" and not "wrEck." Maybe they spelled it that way years ago. We used to hear the phrase "to rack and to ruin," so maybe there's a connection.

This past week has witnessed articles concerning problems with Catholic priests' failures in chastity (sex only within marriage). The celibate vocation is for the Latin rite the typical condition to be ordained a priest. The celibate person (priest or not) witnesses to the primacy of everyone's relationship with God over spousal relations, however good and necessary they are to the Kingdom.

Hopkins had struggles with his creed, his family loyalties, his emotions--even, it seems, with his sexuality. His poems were sallies in a well-waged spiritual campaign.

In "The Shipwrack-Harvest Podcast," I wish to narrate these poetic forays so their sacredness and whimsy can "fling out broad [the] name" of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I hope you can join me.

Available on Anchor.fm:
https://anchor.fm/shipwrack-harvest

My podcast RSS feed:
https://anchor.fm/s/9577d18/podcast/rss

Reading "The Wreck," Stanzas 24-27

24             Away in the loveable west,	185
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails	190
Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’:
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.
25             The majesty! what did she mean?
Breathe, arch and original Breath.
Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been?	195
Breathe, body of lovely Death.
They were else-minded then, altogether, the men
Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth.
Or is it that she cried for the crown then,
The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?	200
26             For how to the heart’s cheering
The down-dugged ground-hugged grey
Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing
Of pied and peeled May!
Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher,	205
With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,
What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?
27             No, but it was not these.
The jading and jar of the cart,	210
Time’s tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease
Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart,
Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds
The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart:
Other, I gather, in measure her mind’s	215
Burden, in wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas.

I was at rest: The first half of stanza 24 comes to mind when I think of my brother priests (or their charges) who are serving in the military. While other noble souls are in the storm--whatever form the storm may take--I have nothing to complain about. Pope Francis called upon priests to acquire the scent of their flock by engaging deeply in their service. Smell like seminarians, high-school students, the elderly, prisoners, or anyone else--just be out there among them!  That's what Hopkins was doing in his particular setting, so I don't believe that Hopkins was considering his academic responsibilities as a sinecure.  It is neither proper nor helpful to compare one person's task to another's. If both do their best, working prayerfully, rigorously, and generously, God be praised!

Christ, come quickly: The recent story of the "Missouri Mystery Priest" (upon which I reflected here) tells of an alter Christus who responded to an emergency call with prayer, encouragement, and sacramental ministration. The teenage accident victim thought enough to call out for prayer at that crucial moment. The swift and cautious attention of emergency personnel is a very real kind of prayer, so if they didn't answer the young woman's request vocally, I'd understand. The second responder--the priest--surely made a vocal response!

I'd like to think that any of us priests would do that, but then I'd have to reflect on whether I'd do that!

As a newly-ordained priest I was driving back to the rectory from a visit home when I noticed police and emergency vehicles gathered at the side of a road. I stopped farther down the road and, oil stock in hand, marched over to the site. A car had lost control, broke through a guard rail, and fallen down the embankment. I hailed a responder, identified myself as a Catholic priest, and asked whether there was anything I could do. The gentleman declined, and, tail between my legs, I proceeded back to my car. On the way I muttered something to myself that revealed my ethnic and religious biases. "Catholics wouldn't have refused me." As usual, it's not about me!

Since that day I think I may have stopped once at an accident scene. Nowadays I offer a blessing and a prayer as I drive by, amid the occasional interior conviction of (1) being the priest or the Levite who passed by the beating victim, or (2) wanting to be the poster boy for the priesthood. When the opportunity presents itself again, I pray that I will respond as the Holy Spirit prompts.

But automobile accidents aren't the only kind of storm that calls for Christ to come quickly. It could be the ring of the doorbell, the tap on the shoulder, the "Father, do you have a minute for a quick Confession?", the page for me to answer the phone or hospital beeper, the e-mail, or whatever.

What did she mean? Hopkins asks the "arch and original Breath," the Holy Spirit, to help him to answer that question. Is the Spirit ("love in her") within the nun, "making intercession for the saints" (cf. Rom 8:27) through her plea? For the nun, death is "lovely." By her cry she is welcoming death and the Christ Who comes to people precisely through death. Another option Hopkins considers is the "crown" of martyrdom, the crown of life (cf. Rev 2:10). That, too, comes only through death; and usually an unpleasant one, for all its reward. The disciples gathered in the wind-tossed boat (Mt 8:23ff), flushed with fear, didn't seem to be thinking of a glorious witness for their Master; rather they were crying for divine rescue. On a purely human level, the terror of the moment suffices for anyone to wish it were all over.

The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combatting keen: That's just a smartly alliterative way of saying, "The crown [of everlasting life] is a terrific reward for this mortifying wind."

"How do you spell relief?" In Stanza 26 Hopkins draws upon natural sources of cheer: the breaking of gloomy storm-clouds to reveal sunny or starlit skies. Then he polls the reader for his own "heaven of desire" that surpasses even the delight of the senses.

So, what did she mean anyhow? Hopkins returns to the earlier question to rule out the idea that the storm (in its myriad forms) drove her to petition for Christ's coming. "The jading and jar of the cart" (another Wreck favorite) refers to the physical, mental, and emotional erosion that often happens to laborers. The actual meteorological event is insufficient to render her virtuous or to conform her to the impassioned Christ. The mere experience of hardship doesn't of itself make a saint out of a sinner. Prayer and meditation--conscious and free alignment of the soul to God--contribute to that lifelong effort.

We imagine that this nun communicated fondly and often with her Master, so she must not have considered her present plight as an example of His absence--a gap that God might bridge, if He wanted to, by arriving, oils in hand, on the scene.

Reading "The Wreck," Stanza 1

Much as an eager Bible reader starts at Genesis 1:1, unknowingly planning sabotage around Numbers 4:12, even so do I begin my treatment of Hopkins by considering his signature work, Wreck of the Deutschland.

This "signature" is not the "X" of an illiterate; rather it has all the flourish of a John Hancock.  I have long identified with our poet as a sucker for punishment, sincerely motivated by--or at  least intrigued by--divine love.


One of the chief features in GMH's poetry is the use of what he called "sprung rhythm", imitative of natural speech.  Hopkins did not equate sprung rhythm with "free verse" because he used a definite pattern of feet per line, evident throughout "Wreck."  Stressed syllables matter most.

(For a scanned version of the Wreck, kindly seek other shores.)

THOU mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

The very first line fittingly presents the dual poles of concern in the speaker's life: God and the self.  I am reminded of the incipit of a prayer of Augustine:

Domine Iesu, noverim me, noverim Te. 

Lord Jesus, that I may know myself, that I may know You.

Consciousness of one's self as always dwelling in God, steeped in Him as a teabag in water.  But who is who?  Perhaps God is the teabag, and everything of Him is to enrich and enflavor us.  Or He is the water, the atmosphere that draws out from us "our best and worst" and provides the medium for our true usefulness and flourishing.  Either way, the result is meant to be savored, consumed.

The connective tissue of God and self, the participle "mastering"--is in the present progressive: ongoing, current action.  Hopkins seemed to experience God (and the disciple's discipline) in terms demanding--nay, violent; nay, (curiously) loving--as the poem will unfurl.  The writer makes God the first and last subject of this work's sentences, addressing Him in the reverent Thou that Buber and others will adopt in time.

"Thou mastering me" could be hyphenated, to form an adjective: GMH describes God as the One who habitually and entirely demands personal subjection.  The relationship of Hopkins to God is established straightaway, forcefully.

The "Giver of breath and bread": such a Being is worthy of Hopkins' subjection, for He is responsible for respiration and nutrition.  Perhaps they'd call this a "hendiadys," a literary device for expressing one reality (the totality of existence) through two items.

How intricately described is the process of creation, simplistic in its components (bones, veins, flesh)!

And how easily His creations can be unraveled!  "Almost unmade" (GMH's scansion calls for accents on the first syllables of each word): It calls to mind the permission that God gave to Satan with respect to His servant Job: "Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand upon his person" (1:12).  Hopkins speaks from the vantage point of a survivor...but his strife may not be o'er.  The same contact ("thy finger") that created him in love, nearly destroyed him once; and now it threatens a repeat performance--whether to recreate, rescind, or both.  Historically, the tempest and the shipwreck are "Thy doing," but the term is subject to untold expansion (what is somehow not His doing?).

In faith we await a time when we can speak freely and gratefully of current treacheries, the better able to see the Lord's providential direction at work throughout.

Over The Waves, Revisited

While my previous posting concerned a transmission across airwaves, this posting posits me in the midst of a tempestuous sea.

The situation isn't as dramatic as it sounds.

For some time I have been considering the creation of a blog by the name of The Shipwrack-Harvest.  Strange, that I had a name for it before I had a purpose.  But that's the Internet for you, making it easier to "shoot first and ask questions later."  Shoot I did, with this result:

Wow--for the very first time I just took a "screenshot" on my computer!  I've done it numerous times on my phone (though only once on purpose).  This demonstrates to you, patient reader, how far I've come.

Unlike St. Paul, who considered himself in no way inferior to the "superapostles" (2 Cor 11:5), I have questioned my own effectiveness as a blogger.  Some have suggested better--or any--marketing; I proffer ongoing refinement of writing skills and general discipline (with special emphasis on reading, reflecting, and writing).  With the advent of SH, I suspect I will be further "burdened with much serving" (John 10:40).

Not unlike the vessel after which this new blog is named, I don't know how SH will end up.  I may decide to funnel everything into it, to let it capsize, or to balance blogwork betwixt the two.

My decision may come quickly; but so may Christ, rendering deliberation unnecessary.  Meanwhile, I like the title and the concept, so we'll see.

My readership is most welcome to contribute opinions, as one reader has done.  Meanwhile, the "one thing necessary" (Luke 10:42)--pastoral activity--will not abate.  Fine by me!