About

I have two “very most favorite” poems:  “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins and “i thank you God for most this amazing day” by e.e. cummings.  Both have gifted me with many glorious praise-filled recitations, but the first has also provided the premise for this site–“the brown brink eastward”–the place where the redemptive power of the Holy Spirit shines through the dimness of this broken world.  Here is the poem in it’s entirety:

God’s Grandeur

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

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.

This site chronicles some of the ways that I see that “shining from shook foil” flaming out in the lives of everyday people–myself, my family and other sojourners that I know and love.  Some of its expressions may seem mundane–like the sharing of recipes between keepers of the home–but all represent the transformative power of God’s spirit through his word and in his people.  “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” Romans 15:13.