Last Saturday at sunrise, I had finally had enough. I turned around after taking the above photo, and there was my stalker — again — watching me. The morning before, he had passed me eight times in his car, slowing down each time to make sure I saw him. He no longer photographs me as he did last year, but his unrelenting appearances are always unsettling and disruptive to my peace of mind.

But this post is not about my stalker so try to refrain from commenting about him. Rather, this post is about what I discovered when I got into my car and drove to a place in farmland where I’ve never been and where he would not be able to find me.

But then I saw this and thought I had stumbled across a cathedral in England:

I looked around. All was charged with grandeur:

When I got home, I looked up Manley’s poem, “God’s Grandeur.” It is not an easy read, but Google saw it as a sonnet describing “a world infused by God with a beauty and power that withstands human corruption.” It was a perfect poem to mitigate against the ugliness that would erupt on the White House lawn later that evening. Following is the poem:

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.

To tell you the truth, I still don’t quite get this poem, but its musicality is beautiful and the last three lines do describe what I witnessed last Saturday morning. Ah! what bright wings I had!