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Pied means having more than one colour and it’s the abundance and variety of nature that Hopkins so admires - “all things counter, original, spare, strange”. I cannot help thinking how often we struggle with appreciating pied things today, how we prefer things that are quickly graspable and are often wary of people that can’t easily be categorised. For Hopkins, diversity is a cause for celebration, and there is no need to try and make sense of everything in the natural world. We can simply marvel at the swift and the slow, the sweet and the sour, the dazzling and the dim. As you’ll know by now, I love drawing inspiration and finding common ground between ideas in many different faith traditions. But I have a special place in my heart for Ignatian spirituality (that’s the Jesuits) which I studied for two years at the London School of Spiritual Direction. The idea of God in all things is foundational to Ignatian teachings, and has hugely influenced my thinking about photography and much else. “All the things in this world are gifts of God, created for us, to be the means by which we can come to know him better, love him more surely, and serve him more faithfully,” St. Ignatius of Loyola wrote in his Spiritual Exercises sometime between 1522-24. This compilation of meditations, prayers, and other contemplative practices would have been the basis for all Gerard Manley Hopkins’ personal prayer as well as his Jesuit preaching. And Pied Beauty perfectly expresses the experience of finding God in all things. At a low point in my life, I went on retreat to St Bueno’s in North Wales, where Gerard Manley Hopkins lived from 1874-7 and wrote much of his most powerful poetry including Pied Beauty. I found it to be a place of wise and compassionate hospitality, where I felt not only safe to be sad, but also safe to let nature heal a broken part of my spirit. My retreat ran from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, which is to say across a pretty theologically intense few days. If you’re a Christian, Good Friday is one of the bleakest days of the year, and Holy or Black Saturday one of the most hopeless. I remember feeling like I’d been stuck on a kind of Groundhog Holy Saturday for years of my life, shrivelling into a smaller and smaller package of my own misery. I had struggled to find much joy or pleasure in anything, an experience very characteristic of depression. But in a silver lining to this dark time, I was drawn to the very practical advice on managing periods of desolation that can be found in Jesuit teaching. When I woke at St Bueno’s on that Easter Sunday, the whole building had been filled with Spring flowers and sunlight was pouring through the windows. It had been a silent retreat but on the last day there was beautiful music being played in the chapel, and the various retreatants all greeted and blessed one another. I remember that I tried to resist the joy because I had come to feel strangely safe in my misery, but in the end I could not deny a sense of resurrection as I ate my breakfast and then strided out alone over the nearby hills. I felt Gerard Manley Hopkins presence so strongly that day, knowing how desolate he had often felt inside that building, but also what great consolation he had found in the landscape around it. I wonder how we can meet all the dappled parts in ourselves, making peace with the challenging contrasts between those days when we feel fiery and fast and those days when we feel subdued or sad. Mostly I can’t fathom it at all, but I know that trying to resist it has only caused me pain. So I deeply appreciate Hopkins’ stance in this poem, that it’s a fool’s errand to try make sense of everything - “who knows how?”. Better to use our fickle, freckled and flawed humanity just to be astonished by it all. I can feel how this third week of Advent is already lifting my spirits and hope you are also experiencing some of the joy. I’ll be back tomorrow, Sophie ✨
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