Saturday, April 23, 2016

Praise him who fathers-forth

Here's Fr. Glenn's conclusion to his sermon for Good Shepherd Sunday:

Everything that matters depends on this: Jesus Christ is God and this God became a real human being. He has always been God and he always will be God but has not always been a human being. He became a human being at a specific time in a specific place just like all of us: he had a Mother. He received his humanity, body and all, from Mary. He is of Mary’s flesh. As sure as you are the flesh of your mother, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity became the flesh his Mother, thus the Church’s august title for Mary is Theotokos: “Mother of God.” Furthermore God’s human flesh, his human nature, is now part and parcel of God’s interior life and it always will be. He will never cease to be a human being. In Genesis we have the narrative of man made in the image of God while in life of Jesus Christ we have the narrative of God made in the image of man. In the story of God’s life made flesh we see not only the uncreated glory of the only begotten Son, but we also see the created glory of his creature man uplifted as God had always intended. What we think is a dappled worm meant to slug its life through dirt, God means to be dazzling white butterfly fit to handle heavenly things. Glory be to God! Praise him who fathers-forth, praise him “whose beauty is past change.” Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

I love the beautiful interplay with Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty":

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.