Pied Beauty and the Incarnation

 

Another not-written-by-me and I may be violating something here. I recently subscribed to the Free Press and it does not disappoint. This well-known and respected Catholic priest gets it right. 

Forwarded this email? Subscribe for more Things Worth Remembering Sunday, 12.28.2025 View in Browser Things Worth Remembering: The Divine Beauty of Imperfection Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ teaches us to see in every speckled, contradictory thing an icon of the God who did not disdain to be born among humanity. “The incarnation is a declaration that God delights in intimacy with his creation.” (Rudolf Dietrich/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images) By Robert A. Sirico PAID Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, during the 12 Days of Christmas, Father Robert A. Sirico explains how Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tells the season’s quietly revolutionary story: that of a God who embraces the world in all its imperfections. We’re used to a certain Christmas aesthetic: warm, domestic, sentimental, festive. The imagery traces back to 1848, when an etching was published of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their children in front of their decorated tree. Today, your living rooms may be littered with the modern evidence of this tradition: trees adorned with ornaments; oranges stuck with cloves; leftovers filling the refrigerators; extended family members lounging about the couches before traveling back home. This spirit brings light to the holiday season. But, of course, the theological drama of Christmas began long before the Victorian era. Most of us know that Christmas tells the story of the incarnation: the conviction that God took on human form in the body of baby Jesus. But people tend not to recognize just how revolutionary that story is. The incarnation is not the story of a distant deity intruding into the world, or decorating it for a seasonal pageant. Instead, it is the mystery of the divine breaking forth from within creation, through the consent of a woman, reclaiming the world for the God who fashioned it. If this sentiment seems abstract, consider Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.” The poem, written in 1877 and published in 1918, offers a bracing theological lens through which to view the season. It reads: Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. Hopkins celebrates “dappled things”—the spotted cow, the trout shimmering in a stream, the feathered finch. His world is textured with variety, oddness, singularity. “All trades,” he writes, “their gear and tackle and trim,” reveal God’s grandeur. Though unknown to most of his contemporaries, Hopkins proved to be one of the most insightful commentators on the meaning of creation. His poem echoes Genesis, where the world is spoken into being in all its abundant diversity. And it anticipates Bethlehem, where the Creator enters his creation not to abolish its mottled character but to redeem it from within. Christianity—and Judaism before it—takes the physical world with the utmost seriousness. These are earthy religions, shaping culture, art, law, and institutions, because they insist that what happens on Earth matters. The radical nature of this approach came home to me once at a dinner with progressive sophisticates who were bemused to find a priest among them. One guest, attempting graciousness, wondered aloud how my God could be “so small” as to become a baby. I responded that this was not an embarrassment but the very demonstration of his greatness: that so much could dwell in so little, that the infinite could inhabit an infant. The incarnation is a declaration that God delights in intimacy with his creation. This is precisely the divine act Hopkins helps us perceive. The eternal word, radiant in unchanging beauty, steps into the variegated textures of human life—not idealized humanity, polished and smoothed, but our actual condition with its mixed motives, contradictory desires, and “pied” hopes. For example: The manger scene, which depicts the birth of Jesus, is so often sanitized in our imaginations. But in reality, it was anything but: rough boards, cold air, the smell of animals, shepherds rubbing sleep from their eyes. It was the world as it is: unpredictable, vulnerable, unvarnished. And it was there, not in a palace or temple, that God chose to be born. The manger is not a charming aesthetic flourish; it is a theological claim. Divinity has pitched its tent among the ordinary, the blemished, the uncertain. The maker of the stars now relies on the heartbeat of a young mother. The omnipotent God lies wrapped in the weakness of newborn flesh. In Christ, contradiction becomes paradox: The immutable becomes movable; the boundless becomes bounded; the light steps into the play of shadows. And this is why the Christmas season continues to disarm. It refuses the thin spirituality that insists we must escape the complexities of life to find God. Christmas insists the opposite: Grace is not found beyond the “pied” world but precisely in it. Hopkins’s language captures this beautifully. “With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim” he strings together contradictions held together by praise. He moves from the vastness of landscapes to the smallness of human labor—ploughs, trades, tools. The poem’s final injunction reads, “Praise him.” Hopkins offers no tidy explanation, no philosophical treatise to the imperfections of life. He simply marvels at the God who fathers both the spotted cow and the child of Bethlehem. The same God who delights in rose-moles on trout flesh delights to be born as a small, homeless, Middle Eastern infant. The same God who lavishes creation with abundant variety enters that variety himself to heal it. Christmas is the moment the immutable God embraces the mutable world, dignifies it, and begins the long work of restoring it. The Victorians, with all their sentimentality, were not wrong to see Christmas as a feast of beauty. But Hopkins invites us deeper. He teaches us to see in every speckled, contradictory thing an icon of the God who did not disdain to be born among the dappled things. The manger is the world’s most astonishing dappling—the infinite contained in the finite, the light refracted through flesh.