Gospel Imperative

In her article What Counts as Help, (11/20) Maryann Cusimano Love suggests that peace cannot be achieved where widespread poverty afflicts populations in conflict over financial and natural resources. The Catholic Relief Services experience in Rwanda graphically supports her point. I read along, agreeing that war is still very much with us, that world and U.S. military spending have increased to obscene levels, and that budgets indicate our mistaken priorities.

What went unmentioned was the elephant in the room: the fact that the world’s richest nation is responsible for the highest level of war expenditures. Our government continues to build and trade arms, stockpile weapons and fund the development of new ways to deliver death and destruction. We occasionally read about billions of dollars lost or defrauded while most of Iraq’s infrastructure remains in ruins.

It is our country that resists treaties and systems designed to benefit all populations. In the meantime, our government and its leaders promote destruction in the third world, proclaiming that we must fight the enemy over there to keep our country safe.

We must put our guns away, bring our young people home, start dialogues with our so-called enemies and be more neutral in foreign relations before we can commit ourselves to the Gospel imperative of building peace on earth.

Ruth Zemek

It is an irony that Victorian, Anglican England produced two poetic geniuses who were neither Victorian nor Anglican. Both were quintessentially Catholic, one so avant-garde he has been called the “father of modern poetry” and the other a tardy Romantic. These blazingly gifted men are, of course, the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson, author of the great ode “The Hound of Heaven.” But while Hopkins continues to be anthologized and studied as a brilliant poetic pioneer, Thompson has largely been consigned to moldering books on unused library shelves. Today’s readers probably find him too Byzantine and archaic.

Yet since 2007 is the centenary year of Thompson’s death at age 47, it seems an appropriate time to reconsider this talented and tragic minstrel. For one thing, his “Hound of Heaven” is one of the great religious odes of modern times, having been praised by such diverse writers as Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, Eugene O’Neill and James Dickey. For another, his poetry, sensuous and lush as it is, radiates a profound Catholic spirituality. Thompson’s work illustrates the power of a religious vision to permeate the consciousness so intimately that it transforms the natural world into a realm of allegory, symbol and metaphor.

Because of this, Thompson had a profound reverence for the world of nature. He saw it as one of the words of God, as a mystical and, as the Rev. Andrew Greeley might say, enchanted home whose rhythms and contrasts, comforts and terrors, spoke of religious truths. His sacramental sense of God’s creative presence in the material world confirms the intuitions of all who like to wander riverbanks or stroll forest paths as they pray.

On Pain and Loss

But Thompson was not merely a lover of nature, writing rhapsodic lyrics about poppy fields or yew trees. He also addressed pain and loss, which characterize every spiritual journey. He frequently reminds us of the price of discipleship and the necessity of the cross. About suffering Thompson was ever the realist, ending his poem “Daisy” with the following stanza:

 

Nothing begins, and nothing ends,