The Hound of Heaven
In 1890, a poem was published in England by a homeless man named Francis Thompson. He had submitted the poem to a magazine at the urging of a Catholic priest who had been counseling him for his chronic opium addiction and recognized the beauty of the man’s writings. The editor of the Catholic magazine was also so impressed with the poem that he went into the streets and searched out this homeless poet and found him lodging at a halfway house. The poem, entitled “The Hound of Heaven,” quickly became one of the most famous religious poems in the English language and had a profound impact on later writers like JRR Tolkien, GK Chesterton, and Robert Frost because the poem tells the story of a human soul who tries to flee from God. The soul thinks that it will lose its freedom in the company of God, but ultimately finds that only true freedom can be found in God’s loving embrace. This theme is at the center of today’s Mass readings. In the reading from 2nd Chronicles (36...