Instresses

Welcome to my new blogging venture. I've decided to return again to blogger after a few years on Tumblr. I've taken the name from Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., whose terms "inscape" and "instress" I really love:

[Hopkins] felt that everything in the universe was characterized by what he called inscape, the distinctive design that constitutes individual identity. This identity is not static but dynamic. Each being in the universe 'selves,' that is, enacts its identity. And the human being, the most highly selved, the most individually distinctive being in the universe, recognizes the inscape of other beings in an act that Hopkins calls instress, the apprehension of an object in an intense thrust of energy toward it that enables one to realize specific distinctiveness. Ultimately, the instress of inscape leads one to Christ, for the individual identity of any object is the stamp of divine creation on it. (source)

Fr. Hopkins being aloof on right