Thou art
indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee;
but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do
sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment
all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my
enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst
thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat,
thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare
hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life
upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd
how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty
chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds
build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s
eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Thou
art indeed just”
Reflection – Yesterday’s blog about
Psalm 1 put me in mind of this Hopkins sonnet. All the references to trees
planted by water, to the just flourishing and the wicked perishing—all of this
can easily be misconstrued as a sort of prosperity Gospel, an essentially
self-centred affair of ‘be good, and you’ll make good’. Virtue not being its
own reward, but a sort of shrewd investment strategy, and the ROI is out of
this world.
So Hopkins’ poem is a good corrective to this.
We really don’t see the obvious flourishing of the good and the righteous and
the obvious perishing of the wicked—it is not so simple in this world. Indeed
he complains here of the seeming fruitlessness and waste of his life spent
‘Sir… upon thy cause’. It is a particular element of the celibate vocation in
the Church to confront this mystery of fruitlessness and seeming sterility in a
direct immediate way, and this poem is very much about that in particular.
And this is a reality, a very definite and
painful reality of life in this world, and not just for celibates. Any one of
us can rightly ask just what the good of our life is, just what we are really
accomplishing. Anyone, even someone with twenty children, can feel a bit sterile and pointless at times.
And it
is a permanent temptation to slide into a sort of cynicism or jaundiced
attitude—God says He is going to reward the just and that wickedness perishes
under its own weight. Humph—don’t see any signs of that happening, yet. Tell me
another one.
Instead we are meant, I think, to go deep in
the face of the mystery. And in this going deeper, I find myself contemplating
the Blessed Virgin, who I think holds the key to the matter. It is this last
line of the poem – ‘Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.’ It is the
Lord who makes our life fruitful.
This is the deep truth of Mary’s virginity,
which is not simply a mystery pertaining to herself but is a theological sign
to all humanity of the very nature of things, the very deepest and most
essential nature of life in this world.
It is God who makes our lives fruitful. ‘If
the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor.’ That God
chose to be incarnate of a virgin is no accident; it signifies that no matter
what a person’s vocation is, what their state of life is, it is God and God
alone who will bring their life to its proper fruition.
This is also the meaning of celibacy in the
Church and why those called to celibacy are so essential to the life of the
Church. It is witness to the provident will of God to create life as a direct
action of grace and not merely or even primarily through the natural means of
life-creating.
And so we are called in our efforts to live by
God’s law to trust that we are these trees planted by the water, but the water
is not natural water, not natural prosperity and wealth and health. We do not
strive to be good so that our lives are filled with strictly natural goods.
The water is the Holy Spirit coursing
mysterious and free through the life of the world. And this Spirit is the one
who gives life to our being and nourishes us in hidden ways, even as we seem to
fail and falter outwardly. And this is the deepest meaning of Psalm 1, which
G.M. Hopkins ably captures in his sonnet here.