All Down Darkness Wide

by Seán Hewitt

I was sure, then, that if anything was intrinsically disordered, it was the Catholic Church. If anything was contrary to nature it was harnessing an idea of nature and weaponising it. It wasn’t my nature; it wasn’t the nature Hopkins had shown me. At my desk, I composed a letter to the diocese, declaring (rather grandiosely) my defection from the Church.

The Church, and all those other accoutrements, ran through me like water flowing through a sediment. I brought Hopkins with me out of the wreckage. I brought a changed image of God with me. When I swam and lifted myself out on to the shore, I felt the light of rebirth. When I saw the million forms of the earth playing in the sun, I thought of my old God, disembodied, and set free.

John Donne’s ‘Nocturnal’, a poem I hadn’t read for years. Oft a flood Have we two wept, and so Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow To be two chaoses …