This is really a reply to the last post on 'The Dynamics of Falling Upwards', which I found very helpful and with which I completely agree. I found, on the same day, Richard Rohr addressing the topic of what we are meant to be via the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I reproduce his meditation here:
Day 257 – Thisness
We must not plunder with mere concepts and abstractions what is the unique mystery of each act of God. As Blessed John Duns Scotus taught us Franciscans, God creates only individuals. Universals and categories exist only in words and the mind. Each thing that exists, exists in its ‘thisness.’ And God maintains each and every thing in creation by an ‘immediate sustaining attentiveness’ in its uniqueness.
No surprise that the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the American prophet Thomas Merton considered themselves Scotists. Hopkins gives the best poetic description of ‘thisness’ that I can imagine, in the following excerpt from ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me; for that I came.
I say…
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—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.
(Richard Rohr – ‘On the Threshold of Transformation’ , p. 266)
'What I do is me; for that I came' seems to me to be the original creation intended by God and that our journey is to move beyond the false selves created by our surroundings when we were building the container of the first half of life in order to find the true essence within.
In regard to how we relate to the world around us, this seems to demand a realisation that each being is unique and that we must not pre-judge anyone or anything. We must do all we can to get out of the way of each person’s development – to gently lead or guide by suggestion, if that is our intention at the time, but not to mould into smaller (and meaner) versions of ourselves. Grace abounds if we allow it to, for ourselves and for each of us in our own unique story. To get in the way of this is to play the role of the devil.
Thank you Richard; I didn't know this was from "As Kingfisher catches fire"... Magnificent lines indeed.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find interesting here is the idea that in a perfect Man – in Christ – what He does and what He is coincide; in other words, He always acts out of His real Person, who is Love. Unlike us, afflicted with and tossed around by those ugly false selves… Yet we are His image and likeness; precisely in our capacity to be, and act out of our real selves; out of love. All our experience is the slow unveiling of this capacity, of our freedom to be fully ourselves, in all the uniqueness of “lovely limbs and lovely eyes”.
Gerard Manley Hopkins is amazing… We are accustomed so much more to the image of the sufferintg Christ; but here He plays – and in ten thousand places! What a shift in perception and in perspective. The divine life in itself is joy: a fountain of reality which eternally overflows; and, as my departed friend Manouk Zhazhoyan used to say, all the rest is only littérature...