The Great Conversus of Beauty

A guest post on Hawks and Hopkins, by Fr. Michael Rennier

“Red-Shouldered Hawk,” detail of a lithograph by John James Audubon

Dear Friend,

I am so pleased to share this essay from a distinguished writer (and a reader of The Rose Fire), and a new acquaintance of mine. The Rev. Michael Rennier is a Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. He's also the Web Editor for Dappled Things, a regular contributor at Aleteia and posts Sunday homilies here. His book The Forgotten Language - How Recovering the Poetics of the Mass Will Change Our Lives, is available from Sophia Institute Press.

He writes from a unique perspective, that of a Roman Catholic priest who entered that ministry as a married family man (there are exceptions to most rules, after all—he was formerly a Protestant priest and made the switch by special provision). When he was generous enough to share this lovely essay with me, which begins with Missouri hawks looping fiercely in an updraft, and lifts us to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Communion, I knew that I wanted to share it with you all.

Whatever your faith tradition (or lack thereof), I believe that a word which all of us are searching to find, in one way or another, is sacrament. While the creedal traditions of Christianity have certain specific and well-known uses for that word (Holy Baptism is a sacrament, for instance), they also have a place for the term sacramental, a descriptor used to describe a sort of general and intrinsic holiness that is present in reality. There is no blood, no bone, no earth, no anything that is not, in its imperfect way, somehow participating in the original wholeness.

To be “sacramental” in that sense means that all things, in a real manner, participate in a common and basic goodness, a goodness that is woven with their very nature and matter, and which is beyond all deserving. Existence itself is a thing that is sacred, and from that root sacredness, we all arise to participate in a sort of madcap, wonderful, riot of being. Perhaps the best way to think of all this is through the lens of presence—we are invited into a meeting, into a celebration, merely by existing. Yes, the hawk really does help us “lift up our hearts.”

This understanding is the domain of meaning and of yearning. It is the domain of lovers, mystics, poets, healers, and priests (and surely some of that list is present in each of us?)—and is the fabric, some say, into which we all have been woven. To live in that sacramental way is not only a mental game of pretend, but of seeing the world more truly—more the way it really is, and not less. It is the goal of art, in my view, to give us practice in that larger way of living, to give us language for it, and to let us, like wise children, learn how to seriously play.

“The entire cosmos is an altar on which beauty and sacrifice are mingled,” Fr. Michael writes below. May this help you glimpse a small, true corner of this beauty that has “been turned to us” today, in whatever sort of place you find yourself.

-Paul

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I’ve been fortunate enough in my life to spend some lonely time in rural Missouri. I wander a wooded property in a valley not far from the Missouri River. I think and write. I have existential breakdowns. I look at the sky. Specifically, I watch the hawks turn loops in the updraft.

After noting the birds circling over the Ozark hills, I sit down below near the lake. Books of poetics, theology, and science fiction are piled in a heap on the dock. I’m not reading. I can’t. I stare at the water and try to exhale my melancholy. My natural inclination is to look down, not up. But the reflection of a hawk darting over the water startles me. It’s like a message from another world, gone before I can translate. I look up again and watch the departing bird as it searches out field mice trailing through the meadows. My mind wanders to Eliot’s famous phrase, “Christ the tiger.” This second glance is different from the first. This time I see Christ the bird of prey. Christ the hunter.

The reflections in the water continue to contain the hawk, even after it’s gone. The reflection also contains the oaks ringing the perimeter, the summer clouds, and the blue sky muted into the blue of the water. An uncanny awareness arises of a world above and a world below, reflected in each other and containing each other. In the sky and the light, in the water and woods, through it all, something ancient and powerful and unitive is turned towards me and I am somewhere in the middle.

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When I’m not wandering aimlessly in the countryside, I live in St. Louis where I serve as a Catholic priest in the Oratory of Ss. Gregory and Augustine. Our Oratory is dedicated to the older form of Holy Mass which, if you’ve never experienced it, arrives to the sanctuary like a reflection of the sun in a pond, unfolding in silence and chaste beauty. It’s a difficult form of beauty that makes demands. It demands I turn to it with a sacrifice of attention and devotion to search out its hidden heart. I cannot look directly at such a sun. It would be too much, so it feels to me also like a hawk disappearing over the water.

Before the priest steps up to the altar to begin the Mass, he must pause at the foot-pace below and offer a preparatory prayer with his servers. The basis of the prayer is Psalm 42, a poem of intercession that, with countless repetitions over the years, has become for me an invocation for transfiguring beauty. I am asking to be hunted:

Emítte lucem tuam et veritátem tuam: ipsa me deduxérunt, et adduxérunt in montem sanctum tuum et in tabernácula tua. / Send forth Thy light and Thy truth: they have conducted me and brought me unto Thy holy mount, and into Thy tabernacles.

As the priest prays, he is standing at the base of three steps he is about to ascend. At the top, he will become a bridge between two worlds. At the summit of this sacred mountain, a sacrifice will be ventured and a risk taken. Perhaps we will stare at the sun too long and lose ourselves in communion with eternal beauty. Beauty and sacrifice are connected, the one opening up the other. I look up the holy mountain, see the crucified God on his Cross, and beg for light. I cannot achieve anything on my own. All I can do is make myself a sacrifice. Beauty must make the first move or I am lost.

This, by itself, is enough to make anyone back down, and certainly I’ve had moments when my nerve failed me and I didn’t want to keep looking up. But soon enough, after a prayer of repentance called the Confiteor, a poetic utterance follows that I have always found mysterious and will never fully understand. With a bow of the head, the priest prays,

Deus, tu convérsus vivificábis nos./ God, you have been turned to us and give us life.

This line of poetry defies translation in more ways than one. The Latin grammar has the sense that the divine has already been turned. Beauty is already in flight, already showing its face and waiting for a response. Something nameless within me is converted in response.

There have been many times in life that I have despaired. Melancholy has mastered me, depression made me insensate, and imperfections convinced me that I was, as Eliot says, unable even to hope to turn toward redemption. In response, I have lashed out. I have sought to re-assert control through use of the intellect and arrogance. I have tried to compel myself to grasp beauty as a doomed, romantic protest. But, of course, I could not make the turn. Over time, with countless failures and repetitions, I’ve conceded that my task is nothing more than to sit by that lake, slowly wander the forests, and pray at the foot of that altar. In poetic spaces like these, I discipline myself to attend and wait, because beauty is already afield and searching me out.

Of course, very few people are Catholic priests and won’t have this specific experience at the foot of the altar, but this isn’t necessarily about the altar or even the hawks or the pond. The entire cosmos is an altar on which beauty and sacrifice are mingled.

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I want to consider how this works in a poem that most of us probably already love very much, one that’s also about bird-watching: The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
     
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

The falcon has been caught by the gaze of the poet and a kinship is established. They belong to each other. This becomes apparent when the bird establishes a reflection of itself in the very heart of the poet, stirring up that which has been hidden within him. Much like when the wings of the divine trouble the waters of creation at the creation of the cosmos, something beautiful is born. There’s a sense in which the two have turned towards each other, they have been converted to each other, kindling a fire that spreads from the heart of the poet and engulfs everything he sees.

Note that, when this happens, Hopkins isn’t up to all that much. He’s on a walk in the country and happens to see a bird overhead. He watches for a minute as the falcon rings its way to greater heights. (In the language of falconry, to be “rung” means the bird is achieving an ascending spiral.)

It’s turning and rising, turning and rising. The flight is poetic, a furrowing of sky and light and wind, the inscription of a verse into the air. It’s only after the patient work of turning is complete that the falcon is able to pivot into a straight line at a higher altitude. The falcon is gaining height so it can expand its perspective. It’s looking down. Scouring the earth. Watching.

What the bird sees is a mirror of its own activity. Farmers are plowing the fields and, during a long afternoon, the plow will turn down each furrow, turning again and again. The metal on the plow catches the light as it goes, and this implement of the soil belongs to the sky and sun every bit as much as the bird belongs. In the turning of bird and plow, reflecting images are reconciled to each other and participate in the great conversus, the great turning of the cosmos towards the poet.

Some interpreters would have it that the plow itself is shining. Some say it’s the breaking of the clods of earth revealing their inner gold. Either way, I think it’s fair to say that, having looked up to a hawk in the sky, Hopkins then looks down to watch a farmer plow his field and he glimpses there a light every bit as brilliant as what he saw above. His gaze, which had fallen to the earth, is again directed upwards. Beauty is so insistent that it appears as light even in the falling and breaking dirt.

These images are all related in my mind. The way I look up and down and up again to bird-watch when I’m in the country, how Hopkins does the same, and how a priest at the altar looks up, down, and back up again during the prayers at the foot of the altar (which Fr. Hopkins would have been quite familiar with). Through it all the divine insistently impresses itself, a piercing talon of beauty.

A fire is ready to burst forth, a grace so overwhelming as to be dangerous, that will burn us if we take its arrival for granted or try to rush it or impetuously grab to possess it. I cannot help but feel that I have been lit to flame by the beauty I have seen, that I have wrestled God and lost. He has touched me on the hip and I am limping my way through life. Limping to the altar. This wound of beauty, the breaking of the clods of dirt that make up my daily activity, has caused me to slow down, to stop, and be attentive even if it’s only because I’m heartbroken and unsettled.

Something is arriving. Something beautiful beyond words is ascending and turning, catching the light as it goes and growing in glory. Some love beyond comprehension has fallen like a seed into soil. Some timeless hunter is racing across the surface of the waters.

We look up into the light. We look down into darkness. In the quietude and breaking, ashes gently glow, ready to rise as flame to the sky. I don’t quite know how to explain it, but at the foot of the altar, the first time I look up I behold sacrifice, the fall and gall of the crucifix. Then I look down and humbly (the force of the word “humble” meaning literally staring at the earth) receive the conversus.

I am of the earth and my first duty is to make ready for the gift that is already given. I look up again and the sacrifice glints with light, more light than I’d thought. Something buckles. Something shines down the stairs and I begin the ascent to the altar. The sacrifice is transmuted to beauty. The sacrifice is beauty.

And that beauty is already turned toward me.

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