God’s Existence Revealed in Creation

 

GOD’S EXISTENCE REVEALED IN CREATION

[Consider] the scale of perfection manifest in the world. Things are more or less good, more or less noble, and so on. Now, where there is good and better and still better, there must at last be a best which is the source and measure of goodness all along the line. And where there is noble and nobler and still more noble, there must ultimately be a noblest which is the standard by which all lesser degrees of nobleness can be known and given their rating. In a word, where there are degrees of perfection, there must ultimately be absolute perfection. This is God.—Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 2, Article 3

 

GOD’S GRANDEUR (1877) by Gerald Manley Hopkins, S.J.

 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    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.

This version of the poem is taken from Poetry Magazine.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur

 

THE SONG OF CREATION

To Gerard Manley Hopkins

By Gonzalinho da Costa

 

Creation sings of the glory of God.

We do not hear it but see it

In brilliant interstices

Opening and closing

Of trees waving to and fro

When the world is radiant,

In glittering leaves,

Beaming stones,

Mountain streams, flashing

Metal foil flattened

By fists, smoothed

By hands.

 

The blind hear the song in the trees yearning to speak.

They inhale it in the attenuated wind,

Taste it in fruits bursting with water.

Bending down to touch the earth,

They become one with the beginning of all things,

Pushing roots into the soil,

Unfolding leaves,

Joining hands with the sun and the dead

Brought back to life.

 

https://poetryofgonzalinhodacosta.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-song-of-creation.html