Ah! bright wings

The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea.  A third of the sea turned to blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed (Rev. 8:8).

The earth is man's domain; it is his possession, given dominion over it by God.  What happens here is man's.  Even God Himself must now ask permission, or be invited, to enter and rule.  Fortunately, through the humanity of Christ, man has now fully allowed God to enter and to rule over human affairs.  If only now the rule of Christ would hold sway over all the earth, so that God's rule would be complete:  Thy kingdom come!  But for now, it is not the kingdom of God and of His Christ that rules, but still the kingdom of man and of the Prince of this world that rules---and the result is chaos and destruction.

In the 1800's, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem called "God's Grandeur;"  some of the lines from his poem have been running through my head over and over as I contemplate the effects of oil in the Gulf of Mexico:

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

and all is smeared 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.

He might have written "smeared with oil" if he had been writing today.  It feels as if the second angel of the Apocalypse has blown his trumpet---everything has occurred except the destruction of the ships, but if we think of all of them sitting in drydock not able to be used, maybe even that.....

Hopkins' poem ends on a hopeful note:

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.