I am forever grateful to Paul Mariani for his biography on Gerard Manley Hopkins. When I first started reading Hopkins, his poems lit a spark in my soul, but at the same time they baffled me. The man behind the poetry, the convert and Jesuit priest who died young, remained unknown. A wonderful poet in his own right, Mariani believes poetry is transformative in part because through it the reader and writer become friends. When reading someone like Hopkins, there’s a yearning to know the man himself. Mariani writes, “I love poems…when I read something that touches me, I want to go deeper, probe further, go beyond the text to the human being who wrote those lines…the grit and the sand that the poet somehow turned into a pearl of lasting, resonant beauty.” So very true, and the reason I was thrilled to get my hands on Mariani’s recent book of essays and autobiographical musings, The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity.
Poetry is a declaration that, “things and events and people do matter,” and even if the perfect word doesn’t come easily, a poem participates in the mysterious reality it attempts to name. Beauty comes to us as if from a foreign kingdom and breaks upon our shores, as Mariani writes, “And we pick up the pieces – luminous shards, really – wherever we can.” The vocation of the poet is to light the signal fire. Mystery is “gleaming and beckoning, gleaming and beckoning,” not only in words but also the poetry of our lives, such as, “A spouse caring for a wife undergoing dialysis three times a week,” or, “A son at a funeral service telling us how his father gave away his shoes to a shoeless man down in Kingston, Jamaica.” Poetry intimates a deep, cosmological reality underlying a seemingly ordinary veneer, so a poet never fully masters words but, rather, spends a lifetime growing into them. It’s a form of surrender. “To say yes to something,” Mariani writes, “to give oneself over to it, can be a dangerous thing.” Beauty is a gift that, if we get too close, burns.
A decade ago, after fighting it for many years, I was finally mastered by beauty and entered full communion with the Catholic Church. The journey began when I first read deeply in poetry – Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Robert Southwell, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, John Dunne, and always, always Gerard Manley Hopkins. I fell in love with how close Hopkins stood to the fire as he peered into the deepest-down mysteries of the world. His poetic insight revealed Christ in strange places – the flight of a bird, the bottom of a well, the Welsh mountains, and most of all in Mother Church. He gave me courage to follow his example, to surrender my spiritual home in the Anglican Communion and follow beauty into the Church – she is the most beautiful living poem I have ever encountered and the most dangerous yes I have ever given.
As a convert and priest, I’m often asked to explain myself. Why join the Church? I can only shrug and respond that the Church is a love letter, written in a poetic language I barely comprehend. Mariani says that certain poems are, “A living dream of the Holy.” This, for me, is the fearsome reality I face every day at the altar of God. I suspect that for most converts, intellectual argumentation is far down the list of reasons to enter the Church. To paraphrase Benedict XVI, no one makes such a major life change for an idea. One might, however, do so for love.
This is precisely why poets have a singularly important vocation. They speak to the mystery of love, and ultimately all love springs from a single, divine font. Mariani gets it exactly right when he says, “…at the heart of the matter is a Mystery so profound that thought alone, language alone, no matter how compelling its force of eloquence or rightness, can never of itself convince us…But I have found that poetry – of all languages – with its metaphor and music and its resonating underthought offers the best way of touching the hearer’s heart as well as his or her head.” Poetry is the language of God. It is the language of coming home. Mariani describes it beautifully, writing about a theophany in the mountains; “and you will descend, returning / to a world which will or will not / care. But know too that this moment / may well return and it will be / as if we came together then / forever and for good.”
I’ve never met him, but I’m glad to call Paul Mariani my friend. We are all on the same pilgrimage together and poetry is our summons to lift our face to the sun and walk.
Thanks for this article, Father. I was not aware of The Mystery of It All by Paul Mariani until now and I am going to pick up a copy. God bless you!
Thank you. Beautifully done–as always. Every word is true. But it’s a praise of poetry and not of God. It’s so easy to fall in love with “the work of our hands”. Poetry is not “the language of God”. It’s our language, a gift from him. His language is silence. There is a silence denoting presence, not absence. I have often used words to fill the void that my nothingness is, but when I am silent in his presence, there is no void.
I fell in love with Christ first, and then I chose the Church for the same reason you did–because its beauty seemed to be the highest human effort to speak of him, including (and transcending) all art.
Father Rennier, Thank you for this beautifully written reflection on Paul Mariani’s The Mystery of It All. I hadn’t heard about it before. And thanks for your writing about the link between the great poem that is the Church with your own conversion.
I did meet Paul Mariani once. And as it did for you his bio of Hopkins helped me also to understand Hopkins the man. Mariani and his wife were introduced to me by their son, Paul Mariani, S.J. in the Santa Clara University Library in 2010 after Paul Sr. gave a talk I attended there about his bio of Gerard Manley Hopkins. After they left after a few polite words, I immediately went to the library catalog a few feet from where we met and located a copy to borrow.
Mariani and his wife were at SCU to witness their son make his final vows as a Jesuit. And I was there by Paul Jr.’s invitation and request that I take photographs of the event.
https://roseannetsullivan.smugmug.com/Events/Paul-Mariani-SJ-Final-Vows/
Paul Sr. wouldn’t remember me, but I am indebted to him also for what his book taught me about the lonely but holy life of Hopkins. As you know, Hopkins was a convert to Catholicism, like you, and he paid a great price.
Hopkins the man appeals to me because in his humble desire to keep nothing from God, he kept renouncing poetry because he feared it was not God’s will for him. I believe writers like everyone else must prayerfully make sure our ambitions for ourselves are in line with God’s ambitions for us. In His inscrutable wisdom, God’s ambition for Hopkins apparently meant that his last years were spent plagued with migraines while he obediently did the grinding work of grading the translations of hundreds of students he never met, and that the world never came to learn of his great poetry while he was alive.
It shocked me to learn from what Mariani researched that Robert Bridges, Hopkins’ friend, did not publish Hopkins’ poems, which were in his keeping, probably because he feared his own experiments in sprung rhythm would pale in comparison And what a surprise to learn that it took modernists Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley knocking on Bridges door twenty years after Hopkins’ death before Bridges relinquished Hopkins’ poetry to the world. How they ever learned of Hopkins’ work is not explained, but it’s marvelous to think about their fortunate discovery.
It’s sobering to realize that someone whose poetry is so great died in obscurity and his work only became known after his death by a great streak of good fortune. I used to want to be a “famous writer,” when I was young, craving the recognition and the other rewards. Like many others, I keep on writing because I’m just a “writer,” without any accompanying adjective—except maybe “dogged”—and that seems to me what God has given me to do. And it’s more than a consolation to realize that if I get to heaven—where my main ambition will be realized,—whether or not the world I live in or posterity ever hears of me will not be of interest then at all.