After a day or so of rain, today dawned clear and bright, and I've spent a lovely morning in the garden, hacking back the ronces (brambles) and bracken at the southern end where we plan to create a small parking place and entrance into what will, eventually, become our little orchard.
I do enjoy being out in the fresh air, although it's also great to come back into a warm house, with our new stove now in situ and working well. I've had to forgo my intention to continue gardening this afternoon however: taking Shadow for his main walk after lunch we were caught in a hail storm, speckling his coat with white ice dots. I know I was reading Shelley's poem 'Hail to thee, blithe spirit' this morning, but not that sort of hail! :-) But even the hail storm was off-set by a full rainbow arching against the dark sky.
Being part of such a beautiful landscape, with its rolling hills, huge skies, morning mists, and ever-changing clouds, made me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 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 warn breast and with ah! bright wings.
I'm a big fan of Manley Hopkins, although these days he wouldn't get away with his use of the words 'men' and 'man' to mean people: but of course he was writing according to the customs of his own time, and the slightly jarring off-notes they create are vastly off-set by the genius of his imagery.
I think I first became consciously aware of such linguist niceties and changing social & theological mores back in the 80s, and, while training for the ministry, particularly valued the work of a fellow URC minister and writer Brian Wren. His book 'What language shall I borrow' counter-balanced, for me, the stridency of feminist theology at the time. I have been very happy to include his great hymn 'Bring Many Names' in various acts of worship, and his poem/hymn 'Who Is She' captures the heart of what I am only now beginning to study in greater depth.
Who is She, neither male nor female,
maker of all things, only glimpsed or hinted,
source of life and gender?
She is God, mother, sister, lover:
in her love we wake, move and grow, are daunted,
triumph and surrender.
Who is She, mothering her people,
teaching them to walk, lifting weary toddlers,
bending down to feed them?
She is Love, crying in a stable,
teaching from a boat, friendly with the lepers,
bound for crucifixion.
Who is She, sparkle in the rapids,
coolness of the well, living power of Jesus
flowing from the scriptures?
She is Life, water, wind and laughter,
calm, yet never still, swiftly moving Spirit,
singing in the changes.
Why is She, mother of all nature,
dying to give birth, gasping yet exulting
to a new creation?
She is Hope, never tired of loving,
filling all with worth, glad of our achieving,
lifting all to freedom.
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