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.
-- from "God's Grandeur"
Gerard Manley Hopkins
GRACE NOTES
Dianne and I brought our three children--Paul, Brian, and Angela--to the same Rocky Mountain National Park camping ground where, seventeen years earlier, we had spent most of our wedding trip. We had seized the perfect summer when the oldest was not yet involved in high school sports and part-time jobs, and the youngest was able to do some hiking.
My wife and I pack vacations over-full with activity, but each day we returned to the campsite with some down time planned, and while the kids scrambled over the granite boulders alongside our tent, I took up residence with a book at the base of a rock whose slant fit perfectly the crook of my back.
The mountain valley of Moraine Park spread out to the west before me, and in the far distance the peaks along the Ute Trail formed inverted V's against the sky. Snow still gripped the upper reaches in early August. I watched storm clouds form and gather on the mountain tops till the sky was bruised and purple.
Now our children love the mountains. And now how will I teach them the beauty and grace of their home in Dubuque County?
The Rockies operate on the grand scale. Mountain peaks rise five thousand feet above the surrounding valley floors. In other places, too, the world's beauty seems to be measured in immensity: Part of the allure of the coast lies in imagining the ocean stretching out to the mind's infinity, and fathoming an ocean floor sunk beneath five vertical miles of frothing sea. Although I have never been there, I can imagine, too, the immensity of sub-Arctic tundra rolling almost forever, undisturbed.
The midwest is not like that. This place is too fertile and too hospitable--despite some bone-chilling winter and some muggy mosquito-infested summer--to have been left alone. We love to call ourselves the world's bread basket. But the downside is that Iowa has one of the lowest percentages of natural land of any state in the union.
Only corn exists on the grand scale here. Everything else seems modest in comparison. Maybe that's why midwesterners themselves rarely put on airs. Even where we have room to brag--midwestern schools as a whole outperform all other regions of the country, for example--we don't crow too loudly. As a result, the outside world forms its own inaccurate impressions: There are be pigs in the streets of Des Moines; Technology has passed us by; and, my favorite, Iowa is flat. Wrong on all three counts.
Our natural splendor is soft-spoken, too. Dubuque County river cliffs rise 300 feet straight up from the Mississippi, and creek valleys slice and tumble impressive arrays of slump block boulders. But nowhere does it approach the mind-boggling infinity of the mountains, the coastline, or the tundra. Our largest preserves, the Mines of Spain and White Pine Hollow, are 1,400 and 712 acres, respectively, and the New Melleray Trappist monks tend 1,100 acres of hardwood forest as well, but most often natural beauty in the midwest, in Iowa, in Dubuque County, arises like a grace note, small, light and unexpected, a gift penny.
For there are tiny prairies that arise, unexpectedly, on the blufftops of the city, kept healthy by vandals, who burn them periodically. Indian burial mounds are tucked away in the wooded hills above the river. Dolomite columns rise from the creek valleys, defiant in the face of erosion, and limestone boulders litter the valley slopes where the shale eroded out from underneath. In January a single bald eagle will grace the bitter blue sky with white head and tail.
Musically speaking, a grace note is an ornamental sound so tiny its "time value is not counted in the rhythm of the bar." A series of grace notes may announce a thing of grandeur.
Grace, theologically speaking, is an undeserved gift from God, as light as rain, as grand as life itself. We do not deserve these things; they are not given us in reward for our good deeds. They are simply given.
But gifts must be received. To be graced we have to be open to grace. Presents we accept and tally how to respond, but a grace gift requires humble acceptance with the understanding that we are powerless to return in kind.
Perhaps here in the midwest we need these grace notes of nature to balance our work ethic. Our pioneer ancestors plowed the prairie from dawn to dusk, and some of us still farm, but the rest of us have transferred that nose-to-the-grindstone attitude to our factories and offices. A midwestern-bred worker is a prize, they say.
But look up! In the midst of all your work you have been gifted with an eagle and an oak trumpeting the grandeur of God. You did not deserve this, and there is nothing you can offer in return.
Where nature operates on the grand scale we are mesmerized, and perhaps refreshed and re-invigorated. But Dubuque County is where I work and live, and I am surrounded by other folk who work and live. This is where my children go to school and play, their own form of work-and-live.
And this is where the grace note gift is needed. That is what I want my children to know.
Now we go to the woods to receive it.
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
-- from "God's Grandeur"
Gerard Manley Hopkins
GRACE NOTES
Dianne and I brought our three children--Paul, Brian, and Angela--to the same Rocky Mountain National Park camping ground where, seventeen years earlier, we had spent most of our wedding trip. We had seized the perfect summer when the oldest was not yet involved in high school sports and part-time jobs, and the youngest was able to do some hiking.
My wife and I pack vacations over-full with activity, but each day we returned to the campsite with some down time planned, and while the kids scrambled over the granite boulders alongside our tent, I took up residence with a book at the base of a rock whose slant fit perfectly the crook of my back.
The mountain valley of Moraine Park spread out to the west before me, and in the far distance the peaks along the Ute Trail formed inverted V's against the sky. Snow still gripped the upper reaches in early August. I watched storm clouds form and gather on the mountain tops till the sky was bruised and purple.
Now our children love the mountains. And now how will I teach them the beauty and grace of their home in Dubuque County?
The Rockies operate on the grand scale. Mountain peaks rise five thousand feet above the surrounding valley floors. In other places, too, the world's beauty seems to be measured in immensity: Part of the allure of the coast lies in imagining the ocean stretching out to the mind's infinity, and fathoming an ocean floor sunk beneath five vertical miles of frothing sea. Although I have never been there, I can imagine, too, the immensity of sub-Arctic tundra rolling almost forever, undisturbed.
The midwest is not like that. This place is too fertile and too hospitable--despite some bone-chilling winter and some muggy mosquito-infested summer--to have been left alone. We love to call ourselves the world's bread basket. But the downside is that Iowa has one of the lowest percentages of natural land of any state in the union.
Only corn exists on the grand scale here. Everything else seems modest in comparison. Maybe that's why midwesterners themselves rarely put on airs. Even where we have room to brag--midwestern schools as a whole outperform all other regions of the country, for example--we don't crow too loudly. As a result, the outside world forms its own inaccurate impressions: There are be pigs in the streets of Des Moines; Technology has passed us by; and, my favorite, Iowa is flat. Wrong on all three counts.
Our natural splendor is soft-spoken, too. Dubuque County river cliffs rise 300 feet straight up from the Mississippi, and creek valleys slice and tumble impressive arrays of slump block boulders. But nowhere does it approach the mind-boggling infinity of the mountains, the coastline, or the tundra. Our largest preserves, the Mines of Spain and White Pine Hollow, are 1,400 and 712 acres, respectively, and the New Melleray Trappist monks tend 1,100 acres of hardwood forest as well, but most often natural beauty in the midwest, in Iowa, in Dubuque County, arises like a grace note, small, light and unexpected, a gift penny.
For there are tiny prairies that arise, unexpectedly, on the blufftops of the city, kept healthy by vandals, who burn them periodically. Indian burial mounds are tucked away in the wooded hills above the river. Dolomite columns rise from the creek valleys, defiant in the face of erosion, and limestone boulders litter the valley slopes where the shale eroded out from underneath. In January a single bald eagle will grace the bitter blue sky with white head and tail.
Musically speaking, a grace note is an ornamental sound so tiny its "time value is not counted in the rhythm of the bar." A series of grace notes may announce a thing of grandeur.
Grace, theologically speaking, is an undeserved gift from God, as light as rain, as grand as life itself. We do not deserve these things; they are not given us in reward for our good deeds. They are simply given.
But gifts must be received. To be graced we have to be open to grace. Presents we accept and tally how to respond, but a grace gift requires humble acceptance with the understanding that we are powerless to return in kind.
Perhaps here in the midwest we need these grace notes of nature to balance our work ethic. Our pioneer ancestors plowed the prairie from dawn to dusk, and some of us still farm, but the rest of us have transferred that nose-to-the-grindstone attitude to our factories and offices. A midwestern-bred worker is a prize, they say.
But look up! In the midst of all your work you have been gifted with an eagle and an oak trumpeting the grandeur of God. You did not deserve this, and there is nothing you can offer in return.
Where nature operates on the grand scale we are mesmerized, and perhaps refreshed and re-invigorated. But Dubuque County is where I work and live, and I am surrounded by other folk who work and live. This is where my children go to school and play, their own form of work-and-live.
And this is where the grace note gift is needed. That is what I want my children to know.
Now we go to the woods to receive it.