Soulation | The World is Charged

"The World is Charged"

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God," opens Gerald Manley Hopkins in one of his most famous poems. After lines filled with life and wonder, Hopkins turns his phrases toward how the industrial revolution had crushed nature under the blows of technology and economic exploitation. Yet, the grandeur remains. Even living beside the ever-buzzing city of Los Angeles, I see patches of glory, despite the concrete prairies that we have today. The fluttering of a Poplar leaf, the quick flowering of a poppy that falls and makes ten more, the snow smattered mountains unveiled after a rainstorm, and the bees swarming like an army around the blooming trees that bookend my firewood pile. These peek out of the noisy city-life and remind me of God.

These hints take me back to a moment where everything seemed just right in the world. A difficulty of these kinds of moments is they are shy of our manufacturing them. You may even return to a location, but the sense is no longer there. Almost as if a clear patch of meaning crossed paths with yours and you spend much of your life wondering if you will cross paths again.

A moment for me was beside a glacier in the Bugaboos in the Canadian Rockies. I was in my teens. My mother took my sister and me to enjoy heli-hiking. This is an activity where a helicopter drops you off at remote ridges, places that seem untouched by human hands, and you hike to a rendezvoused to enjoy a cook-out lunch over an emerald lake.

One afternoon, I decided not to go with the group. Rather, I wanted to hike alone up toward the glacier that overlooked the lodge. After a few hours, I arrived at the end of the trail. The August air was smooth and warm with a soft cool breeze tumbling down the canyon. I was in a field of white boulders with small patches of green grass. It was idyllic, like a picture from a book of fairy tales. I perched atop one of the boulders overlooking the glacier and enjoyed a sandwich. A ground squirrel scurried across the patches of grass. A brook gurgled. Below me, in the distance, I could see the lodge and the trail. The mountain was alive. The goodness of God was present. I felt like I had crossed paths with something that made the whole world mean something more.

Out of my backpack I pulled my portable headphones. I had brought my favorite musician with me, Rich Mullins, who taught me how to see God through poetry and beauty. I played a song that seemed appropriate.

There is such a thing as glory and there are hints of it everywhere
And the hints are overwhelming and its scent is in the air
It's more powerful than morning, oh, the morning can't compare
To such a thing as glory1

God was pouring out glory that day. Or perhaps it would better of me to say that He's always pouring out glory. That day was special because for a brief moment I really caught a glimpse of it. I had stilled myself enough to see what the Psalmist had also seen three thousand years prior:

The heavens declare the glory of God,
And the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours out speech,
And night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.
Their voice goes out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world. (Ps 19:1-4)

Always good, always present, always glory-the unrelenting voice of creature. That is God revealing Himself. And "we who come beneath His mercies will be compelled to sing."2

— By Dale Fincher

1 Rich Mullins, Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth, "Such a Thing as Glory." 1988.

2 Ibid.