Gerard Manley Hopkins: Contemplative Hero

Contemplation is a word we are hearing more and more as we enter the new millennium. Still, few of us are able to define it. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins himself did so admirably, as we will see. But before looking at that definition and at the profound sense of contemplation embodied in Hopkins's poetry, I would like to offer a paradigm of contemplative experience, that of Isaiah of Jerusalem, sometimes called First Isaiah: "In the year of King Uzziah's death, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; his train filled the sanctuary" (Is. 6:1). Not only does Isaiah see the Lord, but he is also literally dumb-founded, that is, mute before the vision, managing only to hear the Seraphim stammer out the phrase, "Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are filled with His glory."

Contemplation(from Lat. contemplatio;cf. Gr. theoria)contains a metaphor of seeing, making Isaiah's visionary experience paradigmatic. Isaiah sees first into the sacred space of the temple, and then into the whole world filled with God's "glory." If the first moment of this experience, the Temple vision, is the more contemplative or mystical one, the second moment, the glory of God filling the world, is the more incarnational. Isaiah experiences God both as utterly holy, "set apart," and at the same time hears the angels proclaim that God's kabod or shining presence fills the whole world, streaming out of and beyond the Temple. These two moments will be understood in the Christian mystical tradition as the "apophatic," emphasizing God's ineffability, and the "cataphatic," stressing God's own will to communicate God's self. Drawing on Isaiah's paradigm, we could think of contemplation as seeing the temple's sacred space everywhere, so that the true contemplative experiences the temple as the template of the holy in our midst, the sacred that is right in front of us. ¹ At the moment when Isaiah apprehends God's utter transcendence, he hears the angels singof God's immanence. Being truly con-templative (literally, "with the temple") is being able to say with Jacob, "Truly Yahweh is in this place and I did not know! . . . This is nothing less than the abode of God, and the gate of heaven" (Gen. 28: 16-17). If the spirituality of our time has learned anything, it is that this vision is not reserved for a Temple elite, that contemplation is the legacy of everyone. ² The paradox is that the holiness or "set apartness" of God fills up the world, is to be encountered in the everyday, and is available to all, not only to spiritual athletes and adepts; God's transcendence is immanent. One does not have to scale the mountains of the spirit to know God's holiness, but only to open one's eyes.

But Isaiah is so overcome by his unworthiness before this vision that one of the seraphim must purify his unclean lips with a live coal. So the second element of the contemplative experience is purification, letting the "unclean" speech of ordinary thought and language be burned away so that one can be a true prophetes, a "spokesperson for God." Finally, as the third element or moment of contemplative experience, Isaiah is commissioned; he is sent to the people to ask them to "listen and listen, but never understand" and to "look and look, but never perceive" (Is. 6: 9).

Gerard Manley as Contemplative

I find something of all three elements of Isaiah's contemplative experience in the lifeand poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins: seeing the sacred in the ordinary, being struck dumb and purified (even to the point of a seven-year silence), and being given the frustrated mission of getting others to "look and listen," even if they cannot understand. Hopkins's contemplative experience was one of seeing the world's holiness, even in its ordinariness...