Today is World Peace Day. I'm neither sentimentally naïve nor an optimistic idealist. Nor am I a hopeless cynic nor a resigned pessimist. I'm a Christian for whom faith, hope and love imply life commitments. Faith in God's purposes for all of his creation; hope that the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea: and love as that which has given me life and as that to which I am called to commit my life.
The tapestry was designed around God's Grandeur, that potent poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and especially focuses on the last two lines. I offer again the poem, and the tapestry, and the prayer, "Dona Nobis Pacem."
God's Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
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.
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