In nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins celebrates the countless ways creation is “charged”—intensely filled—with “the grandeur of God.” In vivid imagery, Hopkins describes God’s breathtaking glory flaming and glistening “like shining from shook foil.” But if God’s beauty is so vivid, why do so many people miss it? Hopkins suggested one reason is that humanity has covered everything with “man’s smudge” and “man’s
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