As we recall from last week, I spent my Thursday night mocking men’s profiles on Match.com. And while it was mean-spirited, in Friday’s case it was justified, because WHO PUTS A PICTURE OF THEMSELVES DANCING LIKE A MUNCHKIN ON A SITE MEANT TO ATTRACT THE OPPOSITE SEX? (Scornful mockery is also justified when men announce things like, “I want a woman who isn’t afraid to ditch her ‘inner man’…preferably long-haired brunettes with nice knees.”) See? I scorn him! You can’t make this stuff up.
Anyway, I was out walking on Main Street Friday with its usual colleciton of odd and mostly unlovely people, when an unlovely person caught my eye crossing the street and looked worried. And I thought to myself, ‘Good god, woman, have some compassion on people. You’re scaring the passersby with your scorn.’ And then I remembered this Hopkins poem:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Chríst--for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
And in this season of the lion lying down with the lamb and a Judeo-Christian riot of card below my twig tree, let’s remember that “Christ plays in ten thousand places” and we get “to thhe Father through the features of men’s faces.” And let’s also avoid Match.com.
