Sandy, I hope you'll read that again and think about it.
May I quote waht may be a relevant passage from Flannery O'Connor's letters?
Bridges once wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and asked him to tell him how he, Bridges, could believe. He must have expected from Hopkins a linf philosophical answer. Hopkins wrote back, "Give alms.
I hope you'll thing about this seriously -- not as a pietistic exhortation, but as an invitation into the inner live of the Trinity. Human solidarity is important not because it's a nice, generous thing to do, nor because it's how we purchase merit from God, but because it's how we meet God. Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10? The entire force and effect of the parable lies in the Trinitarian context that precedes it: almsgiving has value not because it redeems fallen nature but because it cooperates with the latent, pre-existing redemption. In the resurrection, nature and all creation are no longer objects for predatory appetite but are transfigured into a eucharist, objects to be offered in thanksgiving. This eucharistic love of nature is certainly one that shines forth in Hopkins's poetry:
That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection
CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Lol ...
Your friend,
(who gives in kind or in time what she's not got in alms
and finds God at the kitchen sink, while mopping the floor
or listening to beloved voices throughout the house ...
deep in conversation or amusing each other),
Mole.