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Dappled Things
Rev. Jennifer Brooks
June 25, 2006

"Glory be to God for dappled things," Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his remarkable sonnet, Pied Beauty.¹ In his poem he expresses the same joy and amazement I felt when, as a child with my first camera, I walked out of the house and saw a mackerel sky.

The strange pillow-dots of clouds, neatly arrayed across the Heavens as if an Impressionist painter had been at work, immediately seized my attention. I didn't know then that the unusual cloud pattern had a name. I saw only that on one side the sky was a perfect deep blue, and on the other, clouds marched in a precise arrangement of fluffy spots, with an exact dotted-line divide between the two.

In awe I raised the little camera and snapped a photograph. Only later, when the film was developed and my father saw the picture, did I learn people called it a "mackerel sky."

Over the years many photographers have felt the same sense of wonder and amazement. Google the words "mackerel sky," click on "images," and you will see a range and diversity of photographs of this natural phenomenon. Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing in the mid-19th century, didn't have Google, but he did have his own eyes, and a pen. He saw the mackerel sky.

Glory be to God for dappled things," he wrote, "For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow."

He goes on to list all the "dappled things" that have caught his eye: the pinkish spots on trout; the ground dotted with mahogany-red horse-chestnuts; finches' wings; the very earth itself, shaped into patterns by plough and fence; even the different human occupations, with their "gear and tackle and trim."

Dappled things.

How did Hopkins come to notice these spotted, diverse, multitudinous patterns? What drew his eye to them? Why did he "praise God" for them?

What do we see? What do we praise?

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844. He lived for only 45 years. During that time he wrote some of the most remarkable poetry in the history of the English language. He analyzed the sonnet form mathematically and thought deeply about the meter of conventional English poetry. He gave to patterns of words, to sound and silence, the kind of uninterrupted contemplative thought that is seldom possible in the human lifetime.

This reflection probably occurred during the ten years he spent preparing for the Catholic priesthood, between 1867 and his ordination in 1877. He studied at a monastery in Wales, and became interested in the Welsh language and its rhythms. It seems likely that once his attention was drawn to the rhythms of common speech, in English and Welsh, he began composing his remarkable poems with their natural, jazzy patterns of words and silence. His unique poetry was never published in his lifetime: it was rejected as too radical. His poems might have been forever lost after he died of typhoid fever in 1889, except that he had sent copies to his Oxford friend Robert Bridges, who compiled and published them in 1918.

In "Pied Beauty," Hopkins praises things that are different, things that are "counter, original, spare, strange"; "fickle and freckled." He notes the many contrasts in nature: swift and slow; sweet and sour; dazzling and dim. He attributes this glory of diversity to God, ending the poem, "Praise him."

Hopkins: a Catholic priest in the Victorian era, listening with a radical ear, singing praise to God for difference.

Fast forward to now, to another Catholic seminarian devoted to difference: Sister Jeannine Gramick, 61 years old, who has for more than 30 years carried out a ministry to gay and lesbian Catholics. Her role evolved in response to a young gay man who asked her "What is the Church doing for my gay brothers and sisters?" She began by working to build bridges between gay and lesbian Catholics and the church hierarchy.¹

As time went on, she became committed to empowering gay Catholics. She confronted the internal oppression imposed upon the self by beliefs that have taken root deep in the human psyche. These are beliefs that diminish and disempower us.

Let me offer a few simple illustrations. A friend once told me that she hated her freckles, that they made her look ugly. Another friend said that for years she had hated her lips because she thought they were too big &mdash only to grow into an age when women get collagen injections to make their lips look bigger. These women had internalized conventional standards of beauty and convinced themselves that they were not beautiful, even though they were very beautiful indeed. They had not heard Hopkins' praise of things "freckled," of things "counter, original."

And this is how Sister Jeannine found the gay and lesbian Catholics she sought to empower: oppressed from the inside as well as the outside, hurting from wounds inflicted and wounds self-inflicted. In many ways, Gerard Manley Hopkins' voice is still too radical to be heard: not only by the Church hierarchy, but also by its individual, hurting members.

Across a wide range of religious traditions, but especially in many Christian churches, the explicit or implicit message to gays and lesbians is that they are different and therefore wrong. The counter-message, arising slowly but relentlessly from the minds and hearts of those who place love at the center of the church, is that difference is dazzling, wonderful, and inextricably entwined with the glory of life.

It is a fine thing to recognize that each of us has a responsibility to others, that each of us is charged to support and defend the inherent worth and dignity of every human being. But it will not, perhaps, be fully possible to stand in solidarity with those who are "counter, original, spare, strange" if we do not also understand that each of us, no matter how conventional we may seem on the surface, has in some way a need for self-liberation.

Society, with all its messages of "shoulds" and "oughts," inevitably demands that we fall into line, that we stifle ourselves in some way. What of ourselves is "freckled"? What in ourselves is "original"? What part of who we are has been labeled "strange" &mdash not merely by some callous outsider, or by society's stereotypes, but by our own hearts?

Gerard Manley Hopkins, on entering the Jesuit monastery, became convinced that the poetry he had written since childhood was an affront to God. He decided that God required of him close adherence to convention, denial of the original, suppression of the self. He burned all his early work. But after years of self-imposed silence, his poetry found voice again &mdash in praise of God and in celebration of "all trades," "all things counter, original": in praise of diversity, in praise of his own radical voice.

Sister Jeannine, after years of "bridging" between individual gay and lesbian Catholics and the Church hierarchy, after years of encouraging and empowering individual Catholics, found her own self-liberation. Challenged and investigated by Vatican authorities‹the same authorities whose forebears ran the Inquisition‹she was ordered to be silent about the disciplinary process.

"I was being told I couldn't speak about my own life," she said. "That's not right," she said. And, finally, "I choose not to collaborate in my own oppression."

Each one of us has a story of our own diversity and how it has been rejected by the enormous power of social convention or formal authority. Each one of us has to some extent accepted and embraced that rejection, perhaps even while trying to refute it.

But each of us has, within, the power to liberate ourselves from our own oppression. That power is the power of love.

The world was not made for sameness. Each of us is unique, original, created by the mysterious power of life to people a world of diversity. Feel the love of dappled things flow over, around, and through us.

As we free ourselves, we can give voice to the liberation of others.

Glory be to God for dappled things.