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18 “The Dearest Freshness Deep Down Things”: The Holy Spirit and Climate Change Having worked through McFague’s detailed theological thoughts on anthropology, Christology, and God in the previous three chapters, this excerpt, the final chapter in A New Climate for Theology (2008), reconsiders the identity of God and of humans in light of the crisis of climate change. What is new here—or at least, has not featured prominently in earlier selections—is McFague’s understanding of the importance of the Trinity for contemporary Christians, and what hope can look like in light of the climate crisis. Despite the title, McFague does not have a strongly stated pneumatology in her work (at least within a traditional trinitarian framework, as it is usually expressed). However, this is perhaps her strongest eschatological statement since The Body of God. What is particularly notable is how she once again uses Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” (which appeared earlier in ch. 1), but here for very different purposes—not to explain metaphor but to urge us toward caring for creation. Source: 2008:159–76 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; 227 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. —Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”1 Twenty-five years ago, a conversation about the Holy Ghost rescued me from an embarrassing social event. I was sitting across from the wife of Italy’s ambassador to England at a high table dinner at an Oxford college. I was definitely out of my comfort zone and wondered how I could manage over the next several hours of elaborate cuisine, copious wine, and clever conversation. The ambassador’s wife asked me what I “did.” I hesitated, knowing that “being a theologian” is comparable to “being a nuclear physicist” to most people. But I mumbled what I “did.” She smiled warmly and replied, “You know, when I was a child, I always prayed to the Holy Ghost because I figured he was less busy than the other two.” The rest of the evening was a smashing success. But within this story lies an interesting historical note: the Holy Ghost (Spirit) has been the neglected third party of the Trinity—at least until about fifty years ago. Even in my own early writing, I disparaged the “spirit” metaphor as “amorphous, vague, and colorless,” “ethereal, shapeless, and vacant,” concluding that “Spirit is not a strong candidate for imaging God’s sustaining activity.”2 But how wrong I was! I should have known better, since I have loved Hopkins’s poem about the Holy Ghost since I was in college. However, it was only recently as I reread the poem in the light of climate change that it began to take on new depth and meaning for me. “God’s Grandeur,” written in 1877, bemoans nature’s fate at the hands of Western industrialism: the separation of human beings from nature via shoes and the desecration of nature by human activity (“seared with trade”). What should be a world “charged” with God’s glory, so that every single scrap of creation tells of God in its own way, has become smudged, bleared, and smeared, camouflaging the particular reflection of God in all things. Hopkins’s vision of God and the world in which each and every iota of creation shines with some aspect of divine glory has faded in the last lights of a dark Western culture. But the hope for the “bent world” does not lie in nature’s own restorative powers; rather, it rests in the warm breast and bright wings of the Holy Ghost. God’s power of motherly brooding that hovered over the chaotic waters at creation is with us still in the bright, rising wings of each new morning. In this poem we have an argument for, a confession of, hope...

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