September 21

Light and Shadow

 

He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

––Isaiah 53:3

 

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

––“Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

The sun when it blinks on and off on a cloud-spotted, windy day. Leafy slivers of light that slice through the branches of trees above. The marbled ripple of water in the stone-bottom stream. I love the play of dappled light and shadow. Nineteenth century English poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins captures this interplay in his poem “Pied Beauty,” which is a joyful hymn of gratitude to God for the messy, spotted, and diverse things in the world.

 

Jesus gravitated toward the wounded, the meek, the disenfranchised, the poor in spirit, and the imperfect. He found beauty and value in the humble things of the world. Of His own physical appearance, Isaiah prophesies that “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2).

 

In stark contrast, we live in a place and time where physical perfection is celebrated and imperfections are erased—sculpted and scoured away in the pursuit of one’s “best self.” That may sound like a condemnation of the beauty industry, but it’s not. Those pursuits are benign, and Jesus sees the soul beyond the skin. Like money, it’s not the thing itself that is tainted, only the love—and idolization—of the thing that becomes problematic.

 

Man of God, we can always find someone who has higher cheek bones, broader shoulders, more deeply set eyes, and a better head of hair. In the end, none of it matters that much. What is valued is what you did inside the broken vessel—this world-weary earth suit—you’ve been given to wear for 75 years or so. Amongst the decay and death of this world, what are you bringing to the table that will live beyond your four-score years?

 

Rather than focusing on what you lack, Jesus receives your lackluster offerings—your imperfect personality, your spiritual limp, your emotional anomaly—and takes them in His hands to reshape them into something new and miraculous.

 

As Hopkins says, Christ “fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: praise Him.” He expands our pair of cold dull fish and five crusty loaves into a feast. It’s not of our doing, just as we had nothing to do with the DNA that produced our physical features. When we come to Him imperfect and broken, fully aware of our smallness and His greatness, He now has the stuff to reshape not only us, but those with whom we live and work.

 

Don’t curse your flickering light or imperfections—through the broken pot flow living waters.

 

Father, help me accept my imperfections and lay them at Your altar. Take my humble offering and transform it into something You can truly use to build Your Kingdom.