Poems...

Reading some poems for homework and I came across some fascinating ones I thought I'd post...the first two are both nineteenth century Roman Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins.

God's Grandeur
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;	5
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;	10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

And this one is a satirical chastisement of gossipy women by ee cummings. so you know it's good.

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

(also, with the church's protestant blessings

daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,

are invariably interested in so many things—

at the present writing one still finds

delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?

perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy

scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D

.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above

Cambridge if sometimes in its box of

sky lavender and cornerless, the

moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.

That's all - love this stuff. Take that as a personal comment or a threatening command.

I was driving to Starbucks tonight (I work at Starbucks now - what a good job it is!) tossing around the light and frothy subject of whether or not religion is manufactured by humanity or not, and do you know what hit me? I started considering that, inasmuch as Christianity manifests itself in a truly selfless way, I believe it. I think that's why we get so frustrated by consumer comfortable Christianity and pastors in the 95 American wealth percentile and salesman evangelists: what's so supra-human about protecting number one? Scientific materialism would say that our psyches are conditioned entirely by our evolutionary history, and even though there are a thousand places in my life where I find it so easy to believe this, how do the true examples of 'turning the other cheek' fit into that? In some ways, religion is more compelling than science is easy because it's more difficult to explain the occasional holiness in man than his prolific brutality. If I am truly interested in seeking out answers rationally and analytically, if I am truly searching scientifically, then the exception of man's charity should keep me searching (even if his selfishness proves to be the rule on my every side). And it is in this place that Christ begins to speak: turn the other cheek, the last shall be first, give a thief more than he attempts to take, love your enemies.

At the end of the day, the crucial question is this: Is religion merely a complicated form of selfishness (a desire for self-preservation in one's relation to an omnipotent God), or is it something more?

Epiphany

Dear world,

It hit me today. I have such a tortured relationship with writing, and with most things, because I am simply too self-involved. I'm a remarkably selfish and self-conscious person.

So, I'll write when I can, but in the meantime I'm going to try and figure that out.