NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team
OIL,
CREATION,
and EASTER
Every day for nearly two weeks, 5,000 barrels of crude oil have been spilling into the Gulf of Mexico with no clear way to stop it. Some are calling this America’s worst ecological disaster.
With Earth Day not long behind us, we are perhaps more sensitive to these catastrophes than otherwise. For Christians, this is the season of Easter in which we celebrate not only the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but also the beginning of the redemption of all things, including, somehow the Gulf of Mexico and her coasts.
The library has several resources that speak to the way in which faith informs our life in creation. None may be more “timely” than a nineteenth-century poem called “God’s Grandeur” by Jesuit priest and early modern poet, 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.
Find Hopkins’ collected poems at the library here. A biography and novel about his life are also available.
