Frequently, people use the beauties and goodness of the physical world to call attention to the goodness and beauty of God. I think immediately of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ beautiful poem “God’s Grandeur.” The following are the opening lines of the poem:
“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.”
The following are the first two lines of the second and last stanza:
“And for all this nature is never spent;
There lives the deepest freshness deep down things.”
I agree completely with Hopkins’ beautiful view of nature, but I find that in my own thinking, I rarely look to nature to help me contemplate the mystery of God. I don’t do that often; in fact, I almost never do it, and I suspect it may be due to the fact that I don’t appreciate the beauty and goodness of the physical world as many others do. I am trying to correct that insensitivity.
More than the beauties of nature influencing how I think about God, I am often struck by the beauty of the contributions artists make. This is probably obvious to regular readers of this column. I will offer one example from my life that may illustrate how great art has shaped the way I think about God. When I was on the faculty of what was then Cathedral College Seminary more than 40 years ago, a Fordham professor was an adjunct there. His name was Irwin Geisman, and he was exceptionally popular among the seminarians who loved literature. Geisman taught one course at Cathedral each semester. One was on Faulkner, one on Shakespeare, one on Hopkins, and one on James Joyce. I sat in on the Joyce course. Taking the course was one of the greatest academic and intellectual experiences of my life.
I divided my experience of the course into four activities. First, I read a chapter from Joyce’s novel, “Ulysses.” Then I read a chapter about the chapter I had read in Joyce’s novel in a book with a detailed commentary on Joyce’s novel. Then I attended Geisman’s lecture on the chapter I had read in “Ulysses.” Lastly, I reread the chapter in Joyce’s novel. I did these four activities throughout the course. I told a priest friend of mine, who was a theologian of my four activities in the course. He asked me whether the course was worth all the effort that I put into it. Without hesitation, I told him that it was. I said I had never realized that a human consciousness could reach so many levels of profound meaning. I recall telling my friend that reading Joyce revealed to me new depths in a human person, depths I had been previously unaware of.
Taking the course on Joyce was certainly one of the most beneficial academic experiences I have ever had. It was a course that significantly influenced my life, deepened my understanding of the mystery of every person. The course also revealed to me, in a new way, the extraordinary gifts great artists can offer us, gifts that can form and shape us and even act as graces in our lives. Geniuses can influence millions. The power and influence that great artists can exercise in a society seems unlimited.
In a poem entitled “The Tears of the Blind Lions,” Thomas Merton wrote that when those who love God try to speak about God, their words are like blind lions searching for oases in the desert. This is a wonderful insight that Merton offers us. No matter how we speak or write about God, our speech is always inadequate.
No human ideas or human words can adequately express God, who is a radical mystery.
I think of St. Thomas’ insight that though we can speak truthfully about God, we cannot speak clearly about God. Even what seems like such a simple statement, such as “God is,” we think we must add immediately, “But not in the way we are.”
When we use ideas drawn from our knowledge of limited, finite beings and try to apply them to God, who is infinite, our ideas and words are like blind lions. Using ideas that we have drawn from our knowledge of finite, limited beings such as we are, it is as though we are stretching the ideas and expanding them.
However, no matter how we try, the ideas cannot adequately capture God’s meaning. God is always more than we can think or say. God is always “more than.” No matter what we say about God, we know that more has to be said.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. His new book, “The Cosmic Love Story: God and Us,” is available on Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.