For all its prizing of diversity, our current political culture is not coping well with rival identities and claims to political or social recognition. Specific issues or debates turn out to have lots of different dimensions - social, cultural, and even religious. As a glaring example, should a population continue its membership of a certain political or economic union? People have multiple and tenacious identities and allegiances, and managing and negotiating them can be an excruciating challenge.
The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-99) shows us ways of handling diversity and unity together. In his poem 'Pied Beauty,' he declares: “Glory be to God for dappled things!” The poet's delight in the sheer, apparently haphazard variety of natural phenomena is sustained by a unifying religious awareness.
His way of holding these things together can be succinctly illustrated by two of his best known sonnets, ‘God's Grandeur’ and 'As Kingfishers Catch Fire.' The opening line of the first of these poems, that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God,” straightaway offers a delightful ambiguity. On the one hand, creation is 'electrified' as it were, crackling and sparking with the divine presence. At the same time that creation is 'charged' - as in entrusted - with the task of giving God glory.
