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

Rage Against The Dying of the Light (In Memoriam, Robin Williams)

So Robin Williams committed suicide. Cue the flood of tributes, laments, reposts of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255), how "cunning, baffling, and powerful" (to steal a phrase) depression can be, how it tends to infest comic souls* and how particularly insidious depression can be when substance abuse accompanies it.

I am not for an instant maligning this response. Renewals of human solidarity usually take a tragedy to happen, but not always. The Internet is laced with incidents promoting carefulness, courtesy, and compassion "between the acts." And we'll always be "between the acts" (of suicide), for "the poor you will have with [and within] you always" (Mt 26:11).

Persons suffering from depression, substance abuse, and suicide temptations can be helped, but many well-intentioned attempts end up reinforcing it. Helping seems a delicate art, but not impossible and certainly not "for professionals only," because it's the amateurs--literally, those who love--who are the "first responders" in emotional crises.

Among my initial reactions to news like yesterday's is frustration and irritation. "Robin Williams! Well, that sucks! What a waste of talent, generosity, and energy! What'd he do that for? Couldn't anyone have tried to stop him?" As an adult, in the minds of his loved ones he might not have merited round-the-clock supervision; perhaps by that point he had a sense of calmness about arriving at his solution.

I don't know...and that's just it.

If we knew, that knowledge still wouldn't control the situation, now that it--he--has passed. Suicide understandably prompts guilt over the very fact that we "didn't know," or perhaps may have denied, the extent of the person's problems.

We may also be angry--at depression made flesh, at the suicide victim for seeming selfish..for being him/herself in that mysterious state, which is already very much given over to silence, to brooding, to isolation and alienation, and their attendant pain, so that suicide appears the only available option, the last, best prescription for pain relief. 

Objectively speaking, the taking of one's own life is a selfish act, contradictory to "the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life...gravely contrary to [the just love of self, of neighbor, and of God]" (Catechism, 2281). It is one of many ways people deny and defy the goodness of their own existence and its Creator.

However, given the numerous factors that inhibit the full use of one's intellect and will, compromising the full exercise of understanding and freedom, we have every reason to entrust tortured souls to the Divine Mercy that exceeds the limits we conceive (CCC, 2282-83).

But we still should "rage, rage against the dying of the light" (as John Keating, Williams' character in Dead Poets Society, might exhort). Our rage may take many forms: prayer, sharing links to helpful articles on depression and suicide prevention, keeping your eyes, ears, and heart open to the people around you each day--which may present you the opportunity either to extend compassion to someone who suffers, or to disclose your own hurts to someone who cares.

*Language alert ("Cracked," remember.)