Status Updates From A Heart Lost in Wonder: The...

“On these trips, Gerard observed nature with the passionate attentiveness he gave to liturgy. Knowing nature in its most intimate self-revelation through the most minute and exacting process of delineation or depiction gave him a joy, a stabilizing awareness, and elevated consciousness. His prose was painterly, as he strove to incorporate everything he saw, to make it his own” (58).

“This was his vocation: to discern all that was most excellent and lovely in the world, and, through that, to elevate himself and others to God. The beauty of Christ, the man-God, was an incarnational beauty he could love without shame or circumspection, with an utter outpouring of all that was best within him” (52).

"Sacramentals, in the Roman Catholic lexicon . . . 'prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it.' Blessings are sacramentals, as is the sign of the cross, a saint's medal, beeswax candles, your grandmother's rosary. It is right to think of 'Pied Beauty' and 'God's Grandeur' and Hopkins's late despairing poems in just this way--preparing us to receive grace, disposing us to cooperate with it" (4).