I woke up this morning to the sound of complete and total silence, and to thick snow sticking to every branch and twig. I have made a pot of french press coffee, and have been reading my Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament (more of the English than the Greek, I’m afraid). For twelve years I drank only dark roast coffee, but thanks to coffee-snob haunts like Dogwood or the Angry Trout back in Minneapolis, I’ve discovered a whole new world of joe—the light roast. I’ve also recently discovered Trader Joe’s flax seed and how well it goes with oatmeal. And so every morning I wake up before Mass and steep a pot of light roast french press coffee and warm a bowl of blueberry flaxseed oatmeal, and study Greek or get just a little bit further in MacCulloch’s mammoth and incredibly colored book, The Reformation: A History.

Tonight I am going to read an essay I’ve written on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Starlight Night at the Cellar of St. Gambrinus. The poem is theologically packed, singing the praises of God and what Hopkins called “inscape” and “instress,” his own quirky way of celebrating the haecceity, the quiddity, the imago Dei and the luminous Spirit of God pressing and moving through all of creation. The poem doesn’t make any sense, I argue, without the old vision of the cosmos.

I wonder what kind of poem Hopkins would have written if he woke up to such a Wisconsin morning as this, when the world is dressed in so rich a raiment, like a bride holding lilies or the absolved Communion of Saints, or the kind of fresh snowfall world only children and snowmen can (truly) appreciate. I’m sure his imagery and theology would be incalculably more rich than Luther’s when he thought of snow.

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! 

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

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