Late
August, High Mountain Meadows and God’s Grandeur
By Jerry
Erickson
May 20,
2013
In
August of 1980, my third summer as a guide for Beyond, I was assigned to lead a
‘random adult’ trip of campers along with Jenny Dunn (now Bell), and Steve
Sanchez. It was late August, and we were
sent to climb 7,000 foot Mt. Pearkes. We
had a group of adults from a wide range of ages, places and backgrounds,
including a married couple from Ontario, Jim and Ann. Jim was a graduate student in English at the
University of Toronto (I believe), and he and his wife were well-read,
well-travelled (they had taken the Trans-Siberian railroad across Russia!), and
interesting people; and I had enjoyed talking to them.
It must
have been about the third day of the trip, and I was leading the group through
the high mountain meadows up one of the ridges leading to the summit of Mt.
Pearkes. It was bright sunny weather,
and the alpine flowers in the meadows surrounding us were in full bloom, as we
headed towards the snowfields and glaciers above. Jim was hiking just behind me, and as we were
hiking through the meadows and spectacular mountain scenery, he unexpectedly
began reciting a poem out loud – one I had never heard before:
“The
world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out,
like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a
greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men
then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared
with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s
smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the
dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at
the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with
warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
I was
awe-struck - both by the words of the poem and how they seemed to exactly
describe our glorious surroundings. After he finished speaking, I turned around
and asked him, “What was that? And who
wrote it? He informed me that the poem
was called ‘God’s Grandeur’ and it
had been written by a poet named Gerard Manley Hopkins, who I had never heard
of before.
That
fall, back home in Seattle, I found and bought a paperback edition of Hopkins’
poems (which I still have). He soon
became (and remains) one of my favorite poets. In fact, Linda and I had ‘God’s Grandeur’ read aloud at our
wedding in 1984. As a Christian, an
outdoorsman, and a scientist, I deeply appreciate how he both observes nature
as it truly is, but also apprehends God’s mysterious and glorious presence
there as well.
