A Redemptive Holiday Reflection
Dear Thanksgiving, I miss you. Devout pilgrims breaking bread with their new native friends.
White chocolate Hershey kisses with spirals of peppermint
Instead, my recent foray to Target offered no cornucopia with gathered grapes. Only white chocolate Hershey kisses with spirals of peppermint, begging to be dropped into shopping baskets in a moment of Christmas frenzy at the checkout counter.
At moments like this, I search out Victorian pastor/prophet/poet 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;
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;
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.
