MAKING SENSE OF THINGS

Making sense of things seems not to be something that everybody needs to do; yet there are some who want to know the how and why of just about everything. Those of us who fall into that second category of people are easily side-tracked. I can imagine my second grade teacher telling my mother that I was easily distracted. I remember Mother telling me that the teacher, Mrs. Foshee, told her that I saw every butterfly that flew by the classroom window. I was only seven years old, but I remember; and the reason I remember it so clearly was that my Mother wasn’t scolding me. I don’t know exactly what she said. I imagine she urged me to focus on what the teacher was saying and on whatever tasks the teacher gave the class; but she didn’t say I shouldn’t look at butterflies. That was just one of many gifts my Mother gave me.

A good chunk of my time every day, especially now that I am retired and can “afford” to spend time the way I want to spend it, is taken up with wondering about things that some other people apparently don’t care about at all. This morning, for example, as I made two halves of the papaya Margaret and I had for breakfast, I was awestruck by the beauty and mystery of that fruit. The gray-green-almost black, round, shiny seeds, crowding the space in the middle of the papaya, surrounded by the bright pink flesh of the fruit... the experience of laying it open reminded me that all living things have hope built into them... and later in the morning I had a reason to remember a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins that I especially like. Of course, my analysis is an over-simplification, but essentially it’s a poem about hope that exists in the middle of doubt.

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.

It’s not likely that many people will understand the why and how of my leap from breakfast papaya to Gerald Manley Hopkins’ “last lights off the black West” (sunset) reassuringly followed by “Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--.” The way the human mind works doesn’t require explanation to be appreciated. My seeing hope in the cradle of papaya seeds doesn’t need explanation.