Being Seen

August is that month that seems to evaporate into nothingness in our modern times.  It is the month where summer abruptly ends and school begins.  There is a kind of 'false" autumn because we are programmed to think of school as fall.  And August is completely forgotten in the flurry. August is important.  It is the month of winding down, the month of slow and seamless transition. A month that teaches patience and waiting. We need August. August needs to be experienced.  It needs to be seen. 

As I made my way around the park today, I resolved to see it. It is quite distinctive in its offerings. There are bright flowers bursting with their last efforts.  There are trees already bare and trees still bright and full.  Ponds are dappled with the hazy light of a bright but earlier setting sun.  When you go in close to the world of August, it is fantastical. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet who bothered to look at everything this way. He has become my hero. It was said of him, when he was in the Jesuit novitiate, that the cutting down of trees was painful for him. He said:

"When an Ash tree was felled in the garden, I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed,  there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed anymore"  

From anyone else, I might assume this to be affected, pitiful  stuff. But from Hopkins, I believe it to be absolutely true.  His beautiful charism, given to him by Christ for the world, was the gift of seeing into the very depths of individual things. That "dearest freshness deep down things". The connection he made with them was profound and spilled over into a very specific kind of praise - the glorious praise for the individual creation. 

He got this gift from our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the creating Word of God. He sees every "lily of the field". Every sparrow. And most importantly he sees each of us this way. 

  

  He sees each us and our "inscapes" to perfection.  He sought OUT the individual. He saw Zaccheus in the tree, he felt the poor woman touch his garment in the crowd, he saw the crippled man at the pool right through a running crowd, he saw him there all alone. He called each apostle individually.  He saw Nathaniel under a tree and knew his name, he squinted in the sun and saw Simon Peter out on the water fishing.  He found Matthew hiding in the tax house.

We all want so desperately to be seen.  It is not pride or vanity. It's a genuine need of created things. We want to be known by the one who made us. We want to be filled with the joy of being rejoiced over. We want to be seen and touched and held in the arms of our Creator, knowing that He has made us just the way we are for His pleasure. It is the assurance that we matter to Him. It is our connection to the rest of creation, this being seen and known.  We want so much to be "pronounced GOOD".

Hopkins saw it all the time. He sometimes was so filled with the beauty of the natural world and his place in it, that he would weep. I understand this. He was an instrument of praise for the small things, the hiding things, the timid things, the things no one else cared to see. 

I swore to be like him just on this walk today. To tell August it mattered. To look deep down things.

And I think perhaps August looked back in all these things and said, "Thank you for seeing. Praise Him!".