Dear Parents,
What glorious days these are! Walking through the Arcade doors by Cribbin Hall Library, out into the Ohmes Family Circle, I can’t help but want to pause and take a deep breath. The aroma of leaves… the beginning of the bursting forth of color… the feeling of the fresh, crisp air―all conspire to fill me to overflowing, with gratitude, with wonder, with awe and, well, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins (priest and poet of the 19th century), with a sense of God’s Grandeur. As excerpted from his poem of that name:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil…
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things…
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods…with ah! bright wings.
Hopkins’s poem and my own sensibilities are echoed in our educational philosophy. One means Madeleine Sophie Barat used to raise the minds and hearts of children to God was by surrounding them with beauty.
I was recently listening to an NPR segment in which the interviewee was reporting on a study comparing the convalescence rates of patients. The one variable in the study was the environment in which they were recuperating. One group spent time in an ugly room with no view save a brick wall from their window. The other group convalesced in a beautiful place with a view of trees and garden with flowers. With astonishingly statistically significant results, the convalescence of those surrounded by beauty occurred at a faster rate. On an intuitive level, this is not at all surprising!
I hope we all allow the beauty of these days to raise our hearts and minds to God whose Very Self is Beauty. This God is the One who ‘Was’ before Creation, who resides ‘deep down’ in all that ‘Is’ (the One Who wished to be known as I-Am) and who is made manifest when creation bursts forth in all its splendor and loveliness.
This God, whom we have come to know in the dispositions of the Heart of the person of Jesus, not only transcends the material world but is revealed to us through the beauty of the material world.
May we all enjoy the Glory and Abundant Beauty of these days!
Maureen Glavin, rscj
