The Poetic Priesthood

In much of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetry, "a terror lest natural beauty fade unharvested is the dominant note…With such statling clearness did he realize that only through man's mind is Nature made transitorily beautiful – 'quench this clearest-selved spark' and 'both are in an unfathomable dark drowned' – yet only in Christ by man's free will can both be made beautiful for ever." (Christopher Devlin, S.J.)

Hopkins saw and enacted the patristic notion that human beings are the priests of creation – our divine vocation is to turn creation toward God in a cosmic liturgy. Beauty sings to us, and we must redirect these songs of praise to God. In this sense, Hopkins' oeuvre is a eucharistic hymnal, and he shows us poetry as a quintessentially Christian act that is essential to the Church's mission in the world.

Apocalyptic Time

The book of Revelation is frequently misread, notes Raymond Brown (Introduction to the New Testament), as providing a coded history of the future. Such misreadings see the order of events in that final biblical book as – more (in some 'prophets') or less (as in Left Behind) symbolically – predicting the temporal order of events at the end times.

Brown provides a more detailed refutation of this point of view, but it is enough to note that the time line of at least one central character of the book – Jesus Christ – runs clearly against the historical order of his life. He is seen, already crucified, around the throne of God (5:6) a full seven chapters before he is born (12:5)!

This discrepancy alone should be enough to alert us to the fact that time and history, although central to John's Apocalypse, are not simply being mapped out in advance. God is breaking into history in such a way that history is radically called into question; the seer of Patmos forces on us an "awareness of the catastrophic nature of time itself, the element of discontinuity in it, of the termination and end of time" (Metz).

Every moment of history finds itself on the field of Armageddon, between two armies arrayed for battle. One must choose now: flock either to the banner of the Lamb who was slain or to the dragon who has been healed (13:3).

Confessing Sin and Praising God

"The Church does not profess its belief in sin, but in the forgiveness of sin – so much so that none discover themselves to be sinners unless they discover themselves to be pardoned sinners. The grace of forgiveness always offered is what reveals sin, just as the prodigal son discovered the true dimension of his sin in the arms of his father… The final authority for judging sin is not our consciences, as necessary as these may be – 'I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted' (1 Cor 4:4) – but the word of grace and mercy offered in Jesus. Sin is finally revealed only as taken away. Thus the 'examination of conscience' becomes a confession of praise at the same time it is a confession of sin to God."

(Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, p. 433)