http://www.methodistmaidenhead.org.uk/

High Street Methodist Church, Maidenhead, Maidenhead (2026)

05/04/2026

Easter Sunday

Christ is Risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia.

The Wreck of the Deutschland, Part 3, Stanzas 32-5

32
I admire thee, master of the tides,
Of the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall;
The recurb and the recovery of the gulf’s sides,
The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall;
Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;
Ground of being, and granite of it: past all
Grasp God, throned behind
Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides.

33
With a mercy that outrides
The all of water, an ark
For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides
Lower than death and the dark;
A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,
The-last-breath penitent spirits―the uttermost mark
Our passion-plungèd giant risen,
The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.

34
Now burn, new born to the world,
Double-naturèd name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,
Mid-numberèd He in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

35
Dame, at our door
Drowned, and among the shoals,
Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward:
Our King back, oh, upon English souls!
Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our heart’s charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.

This lengthy poem to the memory of five nuns who died in the wreck of The Deutschland on the way to America, on the way towards religious freedom, resurrected Hopkins’ poetry. What did not seem to “belong”, became part of who the man was, part of the core of his being. A gift brought alive – “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east”. In another poem, he portrays one of the nuns calling Christ to her, turning tragedy on its head, “christening” her end. In these deaths, Hopkins saw life – a rethinking of death – an Easter resurrection – the “incomprehensible certainty” of God.

In “That Nature is A Heraclitean Fire”, Hopkins had portrayed the flux of nature with God as the god of nature, the flow, the change and that humanity is the “clearest-selved spark” that shone like a star…and then flicks impatiently to Resurrection -the flash of creativity, the rebirth of everything, transforming Hopkins, the “immortal diamond, is immortal diamond. But here in the Wreck God is called the “ground of being”, “throned behind death with a certainty”. Christ becomes the Hero of the plot, killed but risen, now victorious, the King returned not to the land but to our souls.

“Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our heart’s charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.”

Suddenly, Easter is here, the immortal diamond bursts into brilliant shining light.

A prayer,

Dear God

Christ is Risen.
Let him, this Easter, easter in us.
Let him, this Easter, be the incomprehensible certainty of God.
Let him, this Easter, be all in us.
Let him, this Easter, be the ground of our being
And let us, let us shine…with his dayspring light.
Come Lord, easter in us.

Amen!

These are Pete Phillips’ reflections inspired by Carys Walsh’s Dappled Beauty: Through Lent with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Canterbury Press, 2026.

04/04/2026

Easter Saturday

O Death, Death, He is come.

O Death, Death, He is come.
O grounds of Hell make room.
Who came from further than the stars
Now comes as low beneath.
Thy ribbed ports, O Death
Make wide; and Thou, O Lord of Sin,
Lay open thine estates.
Lift up your heads, O Gates;
Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors
The King of Glory will come in.

I'll never forget the moment at the York Mystery Plays when Jesus entered hell. The sinners were all in a jail made of staffs of wood ten foot high held by jailers, by the people. A prison of their own making. Jesus shouted: “Undo your gates, ye princes of hell / And let my folk come forth to me!" And the staffs fell onto the wooden floor with a mighty crash. Such a powerful image of Jesus setting the captives free – the harrowing of hell, Jesus descending to hell to preach to those in confinement and setting them free.

So, I depart from Carys Walsh’s choice of poems for today (“That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire” – to which we will return at the end) and choose instead this simpler, quieter, liturgical poem for Holy Saturday. The poem appears in his early diaries in 1865 but isn’t developed further. It offers a montage of allusions from 1 Corinthians 15:53-55, Psalm 24. But the poem actually addresses Death himself warning him that “the one who comes from beyond the stars” has arrived – a reminder that Christ is not just a man but the second person of the Trinity, God incarnate as Jesus. Here is Jesus, come to break open the estates of Death. But the reference to Psalm 24 takes this concept further – a psalm which prophecies that arrival of the King of Glory into a conquered city, or into the Temple of Mount Zion, or of Christ entering heaven after the Ascension. Here Christ is the King of Glory, God incarnate, slain on Calvary and yet now in full majesty bursting into Hell to set the captives free. And, indeed, death has no choice but to accede, the king of glory “will” come in.

But let’s go back to the last lines of “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire”, one of Hopkins last and most brilliant poems. The title suggests that everything is in flux – all changes and the poem delights in this shifting process within nature. Carys Walsh summarises it well: Dappled “nature endlessly churns and changes” and Heraclitus fire is the guiding symbol. From clouds transformed by the actions of the wind to the changes of the landscape over the seasons, from a pool turned to dust revealing man’s imprints (‘manmarks’). Into this hymn to the ever-changing nature of existence, and having introduced humanity (‘Manshape’) as nature’s “clearest selved spark”, “a star”, Hopkins breaks into his own poem – “Enough, the Resurrection”. This outburst, this premature arrival of Easter Sunday changes everything. Hopkins’ “manshape” is ripped away from the churn of nature and humanity enters immortality – “I am all at once what Christ is”. And all that Hopkins is – “Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood” is redefined as immortal diamond.

And again back to the glint of a jewel, the silver stars, the Starlight Sky – an immortal diamond. But it remains a hard, inhuman light. It still lacks the brilliance of “The Windhover”, the image of that which “gashes gold vermillion” or even better in “Kingfishers” where humans also “selve” and in which:

“the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst”

The image of the immortal diamond is precise, permanent, brilliant, but cold. It is Kingfishers that gives you the warmth, the selving, the Christ-in-humanity. Easter morning is not yet here. Perhaps the immortal diamond is enough for Holy Saturday. It feels precious to me.

A prayer.

For our prayer today, I invite you to repeat Hopkins' poem itself, slowly, own it as your own prayer as you wait for tomorrow’s sonrise:

O Death, Death, He is come.
O grounds of Hell make room.
Who came from further than the stars
Now comes as low beneath.
Thy ribbed ports, O Death
Make wide; and Thou, O Lord of Sin,
Lay open thine estates.
Lift up your heads, O Gates;
Be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors
The King of Glory will come in.

Amen

03/04/2026

Good Friday

The Times are Nightfall, look, their light grows less.

The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less;
The times are winter, watch, a world undone:
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run
Or bring more or more blazon man's distress.
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one—
Work which to see scarce so much as begun
Makes welcome death, does dear forgetfulness.

Or what is else? There is your world within.
There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.
Your will is law in that small commonweal...
Not quite a sonnet. Yesterday, we ended the reflection with a prayer by C.H Spurgeon which includes a typically optimistic Victorian reflection on technological/societal progress under the Empire:

“A great future is all around us; the splendours of the last age are descending and while we wait in solemn expectation, our hearts continually cry: ‘Until the day breaks and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved [to me]’.”

The two men lived and died as near contemporaries but how different was their outlook on life. Hopkins’ ‘terrible sonnets’ written in Ireland towards the end of his life take us to dark places. There is precious little optimism and even less light. While Spurgeon looks for the dawn, Hopkins leads us into darkness. Indeed, Spurgeon begins his ministry as a teenager in a tiny village north of Cambridge, Waterbeach, and within a few years, he is preaching to crowds in London. Hopkins, as we know, goes to Oxford, converts to Catholicism, and writes some of the best, certainly some of the hardest poems in English Literature, and dies of typhoid in Dublin. Spurgeon uses darkness to point to the light of Christ. Hopkins, so often, lives in the darkness and seems astonished when God’s light bursts forth from kingfishers catching fire.

The darkness in the poem seems unfathomable. But there isn’t the terror here of “No worst”, where we heard of the inner world as a place of mountains and cliffs and potential death. The darkness here is more like winter, more biting, more dark and withering, as though left without light even Hopkins interior world is decaying from within. He can’t help others in distress. Or he doesn’t get help from others, nothing works – he even talks of death being welcome and forgetfulness being dear. He seems to have given up completely, at least in the octet.

But look – the cut short sestet seems to open a new door – a forlorn alternative? We’ve seen this shift before in The Starlight Night – the potential of new hope snuffed out by a return to even deeper darkness. And the potential new (spelt) bread from Sybil’s leaves full of promise but changing to dust and ruin in the sheer blank darkness of it all. The inner life, the world within, seems a place of suffocation. But not here? Get things sorted, he says. Kick out the dragons! This is the place you can rule the roost. Really? Is he kidding himself? The lack of that final line seems to admit the deceit. All this dragonslaying sadly seems too much (“And not help”) for Hopkins stuck in darkness.

But Jesus. Good Friday. According to the Synoptics, Jesus shout from the cross the beginning of Psalm 22 “My God, my God why have you forsaken me”. And in John, as he dies “It is finished!” or better to match the Greek perfect which carries the sense of a complete action with persistent effect: It's not just finished, it's finished and the finishing matters forever. Jesus taken to the pits of despair but saves us all. Hopkins taken to the pits of despair and is so sadly undone. Perhaps the power of Christ is in the inscape after all – in the signs of the cross, in the power of God, in the dappled nature of all things. Hopkins on his own is lost. Hopkins with Christ can soar to such sublime and dappled majesty.

Dear God

What a desolate piece of writing.
I put Christ at the centre but scoff at poor Gerard.
What did Jesus say to his companion at Calvary?
“Truly, I tell you today, you’ll be with me in paradise”
What did you say to our poor Jesuit priest sick in Dublin?
Did you give him inscapes of beauty and brightness to tease him?
Or were they instead his dragonslaying powers?
Inscape a gift to defeat deathly terrors?
Help me to be open to seeing where I need your gifts
To rely upon you, to root out my sin, to slay dragons,
To sit near the cross and hear Christ’s call – “I have done it, for him and for you.”

Amen

02/04/2026

Maundy Thursday

Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, | vaulty, voluminous, . .
stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme's vást, | womb-of-all, home-of-all,
hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, | her wild hollow
hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, | stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth | her being has unbound, her
dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; | self ín self steepèd
and pashed--qúite
Disremembering, dísmembering | àll now. Heart, you round me
right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night | whélms, whélms, ánd
will end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish | damask the tool-smooth
bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, óur oracle! | Lét life, wáned,
ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety | upon, áll on twó
spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds--black, white; | right,
wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these | twó tell, each
off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, | thóughts
agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

Back again to the Terrible Sonnets for Maundy Thursday. You probably anticipated we would. But what has Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves have to do with Maundy Thursday? Ancient bread from an ancient seer? The Sibyl of Cumae received her divine messages on golden leaves which turned to dust when they were read aloud. Already we hear the impermanence, the dustiness of what’s going on. But also the shift from gold to dust – from something precious to something of death? The spelt bread which turns to the dark night of the soul? And no mention of the bread of life anywhere!

The sonnet starts with the darkening sky, portrayed in epithets which somehow seem strange for a description of the night sky? Perhaps normal words have been found wanting for this vastness, for the evening which becomes the birth, life and death of all. Compare it to “Starlight Night” where there is a whole geography of the night sky – “Look at the stars! Look!”. Excitement, magic, inscape. Here, there is nothing left but a list of rather academic words. Something of Hopkins is missing here, drained away.

But then he notes the sunset to the west – a vestige of light – but his words tease at the edge of meaning: is ‘wound’ the accepted scholarly past tense of “wind” – the sun is “wound up”. But that sounds wrong. A wound-up clock isn’t ending, it’s beginning. So is this sinking of the sun a ‘wound’, a ‘hurt’, a sign of the impending death of light, a hint of the metaphorical and actual darkness of Good Friday – when the death of Jesus on the Cross becomes a moment of dark eclipse. Indeed, it is such a Waste – this end of the wounded sun, for now the darkness destroys the very dappled nature of the earth as the colours drain away and leave “her wild hollow hoarlight”. Here is indeed the horror of Hopkins’ dark night of the soul – a place to disremember, even to dismember, which the poet grieves will whelm him/us again and again and indeed end him/us.

And Hopkins ends the poem in the torture of the rack of his own making. No one else is punishing him – he is “selfwrung”, “selfstrung”. His existence at such times is merely thoughts grinding against other thoughts, with him groaning. I guess Judas and Peter were there that night – both wracked/racked by their own mistakes – ‘selfwrung’? But Jesus? Despite his sweat like blood at Gethsemane, despite the horror of his torture, flayed by human power, Jesus acts as a pure stoic hero. Calm. Accepting. He knows what will happen. Despite the Synoptic shift into isolation, the Johannine reading tells us Christ is sure. He is the Light of the World which the darkness cannot consume. The Lord of an eternal dappled beauty even in the horror of Good Friday to come.

And a prayer today from C.H. Spurgeon – the irony is not lost on me a Methodist who worked at Spurgeon’s College, using the great Baptist preacher’s prayer to explore the great Jesuit poet-priest’s work. The breadth of the Christian tradition meeting in the darkness of Holy Week.

“O Lord of our hearts,
home is not home without You.
Life is not life without You.
Heaven itself would not be heaven
if You were absent.
Abide with us.
The world is growing dark,
the twilight of time is drawing near.
Abide with us,
for the evening is coming upon us.
We are getting older,
and we are nearing the night
when the dew falls cold and chill.
A great future is all around us;
the splendours of the last age are descending;
and while we wait in solemn,
awestruck expectation,
our hearts continually cry,
“Until the day break,
and the shadows flee away,
turn, my beloved, [to me].”

Amen

(C.H. Spurgeon’s prayer found on https://garythomas.com/.../whengoodfridaylastsmorethanday/)

01/04/2026

Wednesday

The Starlight Sky

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

From the desolation of the year of the terrible sonnets, we return to Hopkins halcyon days at St Beuno’s where he wrote some of his greatest nature poems, psalms to the inscape of nature and the instressing of God’s presence within that nature. So, he looks up to the stars, a line stolen by Coldplay whose stars shine for you. But these stars shine for everyone to see – the heavens are like a mirror of the earth, full of inhabitation, lights shining from the houses, cities shining like circles even in the stellar countryside, there dim woods drive us underground to diamond mines glistening like the eyes of elven miners and there are plains of grey light, with quickgold, or is it, given the colours are whites and silvers, quicksilver or the planet mercury – a symbol of the presence of God’s light. The trees are like an elven forest – tall white poplars, airy like those at Binsey, beaming light down to the earth, doves scared fly up into the air, floating free like clouds.

And suddenly at the end of the octet, he stops – “Ah, well” and it’s all up for sale – perhaps the Binsey poplars were torn down for railway sleepers and ornaments? Nature for sale what with gold and silver and mercury to be dug up. But wait. Isn’t that what we always do? See nature as something to plunder? Hopkins wants us to question our values, our currency – to change our perspective from plunder to prayer; calling us to actually see what we’re looking at – to see the true inscape of the night sky, of nature, not as nature to be plundered, its treasure and beauty extracted. He is telling us that there is another economy in play – based on prayers, patience, alms and vows. The stars are not a reflection of the industrial lands being dug and plundered, but a place of blossoms, where the harvest has been brought in, a place reflecting the dwelling place of Christ, protected by the brilliance of the stars, with those very stars representing the saints shining down upon the earth. Heaven is a prize open to all to see, if only they would look up into the heavens, rather than cast greedy eyes into the ground.

And on the Wednesday of Easter week, Judas met with the leaders of the Sanhedrin and they gave him 30 silver coins to help them arrest Jesus. A betrayal, with silver, allegiance bought. An economy of extraction rather than the economy of prayer and forgiveness. An uncanny reminder of Easter as we look to those heavenly lights.

We pray

Lord Jesus, we bring before you the memory of Judas,
who carried the heavy burden of thirty pieces of silver
and the weight of his own betrayal.
Lord Jesus, I look up into the starlight night
And see your beauty, see the wideness of your mercy
See the economy of abundant grace scattered across the heavens
Lord Jesus, open my eyes to see the beauty of your creation
Amidst betrayal, and heartache, illness, and greed
Open my eyes to the beauty of the starlight night,
To the beauty, Lord, of you.

Amen.

31/03/2026

Tuesday

No worst

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief-
Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old ánvil wínce and síng —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
Ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.'

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

Often, we’ve seen that Hopkins poems read better than they are understood. But this poem reads with halts and stutters and pauses. It almost sounds as if he is punching himself (“pitched past pitch of grief”), certainly tormenting himself. In the middle, you can almost hear the wincing, singing of the hammer on the anvil. He talks of fury shrieking and then carries the lingering over onto the next line. What a terrible sonnet this is, full of darkness and fury and anger and loneliness. Yesterday’s poem was gentle by comparison – To Seem a Stranger now seems to be sailing on a Boating Lake compared to this storm of dark oceanic abandonment.

Even yesterday, we talked of Hopkins being God-haunted. But here he seems to be God-bereft. He can cry to Mary, but not to God. Why? Because of her own loss? Because by the end of Easter, ‘stabat mater’ – she stands in shocked grief at her son’s agonised death? Is this a moment of connection for Hopkins? Through his Catholic faith he finds in the Mother of God one who suffers like him and who survives?

But now, in the poem, in the reality of the night, there is a whole landscape of horrors to live through – mountains, cliffs to fall off, too much for anyone to handle. A fatal precipice? Is he suicidal, will he end it all, is this all too much for him? But…so close to the edge his mind forces him to words resembling his only escape, for now, “‘steep’, ‘deep’, ‘creep’” always getting closer, crawling under the comforter in the midst of the hurricane. He ends with a reminder that death is his only escape but tonight he has to make do with the daily death of falling asleep.

And we breathe again, our poet is at last asleep and will live, God bless him, to see another day.
A Prayer for Tuesday of Holy Week

We pray
for those who share the horrors of the night
whose nights are full of the landscape of pain
who feel alone in the dark, bereft, even of their God
climbing mountainous cliffs in the painful darkness

We pray
for Christ to walk with us, he is there too
we may not see him, but his sorrow was real
Is real in the horrors of our dark world
Is real in the pain of our own experiences

We pray
For Mary to accompany us, who lost her son
Who endured both his birth, his death, his rising, his ascent
Who treasured his words, who remembered his embrace
Who shares with us in pain of her own experiences

We pray
For those who have no one to walk with
Who can we accompany, God, for our love is real
Accompany the poor, the widow, the lost
Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with our God?

These are Pete Phillips’ reflections inspired by Carys Walsh’s Dappled Beauty: Through Lent with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Canterbury Press, 2026.

Picture: The Valley of the Shadow of Death, George Inness, 1895 (Loeb Gallery)
(can you find the cross, even in such darkness?)

30/03/2026

Monday

To Seem the Stranger

To seem the stranger lies my lot, my life
Among strangers. Father and mother dear,
Brothers and sisters are in Christ not near
And he my peace / my parting, sword and strife.
England, whose honour O all my heart woos, wife
To my creating thought, would neither hear
Me, were I pleading, plead nor do I: I wear-
Y of idle a being but by where wars are rife.

I am in Ireland now; now I am at a thírd
Remove. Not but in all removes I can
Kind love both give and get. Only what word
Wisest my heart breeds dark heaven’s baffling ban
Bars or hell’s spell thwarts. This to hoard unheard,
Heard unheeded, leaves me a lonely began.

I wonder what Hopkins’ inscape was? How did God put him together? As we begin Holy Week, we find a man who is lonely and a stranger in a place full of strangers. He’s on his own because of both his vocation and his learning (teaching in Ireland) but with no family at hand and no inspiration to help him compose. This is quite the poem for this week in which Jesus will also walk a lonely road. But, of course, Hopkins isn’t alone – he has colleagues and companions – like Jesus with his disciples and yet how easy it is to be alone even among friends.

It’s the multilevel loneliness that is so intense for Hopkins. His vocation has distanced him from his family – they are “not near in Christ”, and now he finds himself in Ireland away from his beloved England, in poor lodgings and a poor academic position. More than that, he feels estranged from God, as though there is a “baffling ban” and “my parting, sword and strife”. He has lost his inspiration from God.
Yet, he writes. And he describes such desolation, such loneliness, instressed in words so intense that we can compare him to Christ in his last week before the cross. It is such self-awareness that enables him to express himself to be exactly the poet whom God has made him to be. This is his inscape — to be exactly the lonely, searching, God-haunted poet he is, and to write from that place.
A prayer for Monday of Holy Week

Lord, we pray for all who seem to be strangers
Separated from those around them by unseen walls
Separated from those they love and who love them
Separated from companions in faith, even their God
Separated by nation, language or creed.
Let us love the stranger, love those who seem to be strangers.
Lord Jesus, did you know that feeling
As Easter week led closer to Calvary
Among the palms, in the Temple, at Gethsemane?
So human, so real, alone among friends?
Help us,
who seem to be strangers, know
that you sit by us,
that you hear us.
that you see us.

Amen

These are Pete Phillips’ reflections inspired by Carys Walsh’s Dappled Beauty: Through Lent with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Canterbury Press, 2026. For a further reflection, see: https://victorianweb.org/authors/hopkins/meglio.html

29/03/2026

My reflection for Palm Sunday in the series of Lent readings based on Gerard Manley Hopkins poems explores a conversation during a walk yesterday on the Ridgeway and a prayer for Palm Sunday.

_ _ _

Palm Sunday, 2026

We were walking on part of the Ridgeway yesterday. It was so cold and so windy. Red kites were at the same height as us, soaring, diving; the freezing wind giving them power. Later, we walked among trees on the Ashridge Estate; Cai our Westie puppy was catching leaves as they flew past. My wife, Theresa, picked up on something that she had been mulling over about the Hopkins’ poems we’ve been looking at this Lent.

She said it had made her realise how people seem to hide from the inscape of creation – they cocoon themselves with their earbuds and phones, with their noise and entertainment, with their constant chatter and busyness even while surrounded by creation. They are too wrapped up in their own worlds that they don’t give themselves a chance to see the world revealing its purpose, revealing God, allowing God’s presence to burst forth from creation for them.

She’s right. So right. It was like a truth bomb. Bang! God wants us to soar with the ease of the kites in a gale, to play like a puppy with dried leaves, but we cocoon ourselves within our own world, our own concerns, our own desires.

Hopkins’ poems focus on the interplay of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’ – two words which he coined, based on reflections on the “thisness” (haecceitas) of a thing by medieval theologian Duns Scotus. For both, ‘inscape’ emphasizes the unique individuality of each creation as a manifestation of God. For Hopkins, everything in nature (poplars, skylarks, Margaret, Ribblesdale) "selves", that is, enacts its own identity. That enacting is called the instress and allows observers to perceive the inscape and to glimpse the purpose of God's creation.

Often for Hopkins, this means a direct encounter with visions of the divine – from kingfishers catching fire, to dappled beauty, to the swoop of the kestrel in Windhover reminding the poet of Christ’s descent to Hell to save those held captive there. Look deep into nature, says Hopkins, and see God active in salvation, active in healing, active in blessing.

God, how am I going to change? How do I manage to see the nature of a thing, to see how God has made them, and how they express that nature and reveal God’s purpose?

Open your eyes, Pete. This begins with you.

_ _ _

A Palm Sunday prayer inspired by the teaching of Duns Scotus/Gerard Manley Hopkins

Open your eyes,
See yourself in a crowd in ancient Jerusalem
A crowd of everyone, waving palms, and Jesus on a donkey
Notice not just "the crowd", but the specific people around you
Feel the weight and heft of the branch in your hand
Hear the shouts of praise, “Hosanna”, and those of ridicule
Look at Jesus, riding a donkey, riding to what?
Look at your cloak, trodden by a donkey’s hooves

Offer Christ the specific things
that make you "you" today
your specific joys,
your particular worries,
and your individual hope.
Listen to his presence beside you.

High Street Methodist Church, Maidenhead

05/04/2026

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