Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Terror of Faith-filled Doubt
In some ways, being an adult Catholic convert from an evangelical tradition has its disadvantages. In my case, any sense of catechesis has been largely intuitive, gleaned from novels and poetry and supplemented by a handful of conversations with a spiritual director. What enthusiasm I ever had for systematic theology was left behind long ago with Luther and Calvin in my markedly unhappy teenage years. The gaps are many. As my reverence for the faith continues to grow, there’s still a self-consciousness hard to shake that I could border on heresy or at best misunderstand something that most other Catholics seem to take for granted.
Holy cards are one (perhaps odd) example. My favorite is the one I bought for my husband on his first Father’s Day: St. Thomas the Apostle, one of our son’s namesakes. I love the prayer’s opening: “O Glorious Saint Thomas, your grief for Jesus was such that it would not let you believe he had risen unless you actually saw him and touched his wounds. But your love for Jesus was equally great and it led you to give up your life for him.” This strikes me as the way I’ve always understood Thomas, despite my previous Baptist leaders who were always eager to use him as a scapegoat for The Sin of Doubt. But choosing the right card also made me anxious: was this a “valid” prayer? Could just anyone make them up? Did it have to be authorized or properly sourced? Where did the prayers come from?
These questions reflect a larger fear of how I continue to understand the nature of faith. For most of my life, I have bent and bowed under the pressure of validating my faith through a personal lens. The evangelical emphasis on having an individual relationship with God has its admirable qualities, but without the tangible tether to something larger, it often becomes a sort of albatross around the neck: so much dead weight never able to be shaken off. I still have painful memories of checking in with God periodically to make sure I was “saved,” offering up one more prayer just in case the others didn’t take. Theologically, the most significant moment in my preparation for full reception into the Church was discovering the Catechism’s equal emphasis on Scripture and Tradition. Learning this, and finding a way to reconcile it with how I used to think the Church worked, the Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, and so much other Latin that had haunted my years as a Protestant washed away in a sort of purifying fire. But it also left behind a new kind of terror. If I had been confused about perhaps the most fundamental distinction between the religion I was born into and the one I was called to, what else had I apparently been getting wrong all this time?
This sentiment seems to have some echoes in the story of Gerard Manley Hopkins. There are a lot of entry points into the Jesuit poet-priest’s life and work; I don’t have the space or expertise to elaborate much on them. But this time of year, as days fade to nights earlier by the week, it seems natural to think of his “terrible sonnets.” Often framed in terms of doubt and depression, they can also be seen as fruitful explorations of “dark nights of the soul.” Some critics think it should be one or the other; personally, I’m inclined to think, “O which one? is it each one?”
Hopkins lived an often lonely life, estranged from his Anglican family after converting to Catholicism. These particular poems were written during a time when he felt especially isolated, exiled in Dublin away from his English home. Although it isn’t always necessary to know much about a writer’s biography in order to appreciate their work, such details can sometimes be a comfort in tracing that thread of humanity through literature—finding little reminders that your experience is not just your own. It seems to me this is especially vital when it comes to matters of faith.
Perhaps this was peculiar to my limited experience of Christianity growing up, but I encountered so little in the way of Tennyson’s “honest doubt”—beyond the occasional psalm or something—that any sense of wrestling with God was at least suspect, if not sinful. Among my religious community, misunderstandings abounded as what I believed to be my own sanctification—a genuinely hopeful kind of wrestling, but still fighting nonetheless—on the way toward Catholicism was seen by many people close to me as a kind of falling away. All they saw was someone “frantic to avoid [God] and flee.” The words don’t come yet to describe that alienation—I wish I’d kept these Hopkins poems closer then instead of leaving them buried in complicated memories of the evangelical college where, through an act of Providence, I heard them for the first time: “Comforter, where, where is your comforting? / Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?”
It is frightening to question if the God you thought you knew turned out to be more terrible—in the fullest, awe-ful sense—than you’d imagined. St. Thomas knew this too, as did Hopkins. This terror, when tethered to the thread of Tradition—the reminder that our faith is not only our own—can inspire the kind of hopefulness that I like to believe still shines through these poems, through the Apostles. What is it within us that enables us to proclaim “(my God!) my God,” curse in tandem with praise? Disbelief clinging to indisputable proof that God remains? Where do the prayers come from?
The Word lives in the world. We touch Him with our tongues and accept the faith of our fathers as our own. Sometimes it scares us. Some days there is grief for the faith we thought we knew. Still, “Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.”
