Remember the Stranger (Matthew 25)-A Commemoration, God's Grace

On December 06, 1875 the Deutschland, under Captain Brickenstein, carrying about one hundred fifty passengers, grounded herself off the English coast in a blinding northeaster snowstorm. Approximately fifty crew and passengers drowned.
The London Times wrote the following concerning the wreck of the Deutschland:

"Five German nuns, (four of) whose bodies are now in the dead-house here, clasped hands and were drowned together, the chief sister, a gaunt woman 6 ft. high, calling out loudly and often "O Christ, come quickly!" till the end came. The shrieks and sobbing of women and children are described by the survivors as agonizing. One brave sailor, who was safe in the rigging, went down to try and save a child or woman who was drowning on deck. He was secured by a rope to the rigging, but a wave dashed him against the bulwarks, and when daylight dawned his headless body, detained by the rope, was seen swaying to and fro with the waves. In the dreadful excitement of these hours one man hung himself behind the wheelhouse, another hacked at his wrist with a knife, hoping to die a comparatively painless death by bleeding. It was nearly eight o'clock before the tide and sea abated, and the survivors could venture to go on deck. At half past ten o'clock (Tuesday morning, December 7) the tugboat (Liverpool) from Harwich came alongside and brought all away without further accident."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jesuit priest, wrote the following poem to commemorate the wreck of the Deutschland:

THE WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND
To the happy memory of the five Franciscan nuns
exiles by the Falck Laws drowned between midnight
and the morning of Dec. 7th, 1875

PART THE FIRST

1
Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened
me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee....

6
Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt-
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and
melt-
But it rides time like riding a river
(And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss)....

PART THE SECOND

11
'Some find me a sword; some
The flange and the rail; flame,
Fang, or flood' goes Death on drum,
And storms bugle his fame.
But we dream we are rooted in earth-Dust!
Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our
flower the same,
Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

12
On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound,
Take settler and seaman, tell men with women,
Two hundred souls in the round-
O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as
guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be
drowned;
Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not
reeve even them in?

13
Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky
keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular
blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-
swivelled snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

14
She drove in the dark to leeward,
She struck-not a reef or a rock
But the combs of a smother of sand: night
drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock;
And she beat the bank down with her bows and the
ride of her keel:
The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;
And canvas and compass, the whorl and the
wheel
Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she
endured.

15
Hope had grown grey hairs,
Hope had mourning on,
Trenched with tears, carved with cares,
Hope was twelve hours gone;
And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day
Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,
And lives at last were washing away:
To the shrouds they took,-they shook in the hurling
and horrible airs.

16
One stirred from the rigging to save
The wild woman-kind below,
With a rope's end round the man, handy and brave
He was pitched to his death at a blow,
For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:
They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro
Through the cobbled foam-fleece. What could
he do
With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood
of the wave?

17
They fought with God's cold-
And they could not and fell to the deck
(Crushed them) or water (and drowned them)
or rolled
With the sea-romp over the wreck.
Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-
broke rabble,
The woman's wailing, the crying of child without
check-
Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.

18
Ah, touched in your bower of bone,
Are you! turned for an exquisite smart,
Have you! make words break from me here all
alone,
Do you!-mother of being in me, heart.
O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth,
Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal
start!
Never-eldering revel and river of youth,
What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of
your own?

19
Sister, a sister calling
A master, her master and mine!-
And the inboard seas run swirling and
hawling;
The rash smart sloggering brine
Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one;
Has one fetch in her; she rears herself to divine
Ears, and the call of the tall nun
To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the
storm's brawling.

20
She was first of a five and came
Of a coifed sisterhood.
(O Deutschland, double a desperate name!
O world wide of its good!
But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town,
Christ's lily and beast of the waste wood:
From life's dawn it is drawn down,
Abel is Cain's brother and breasts they have sucked the
same.)

21
Loathed for a love men knew in them,
Banned by the land of their birth,
Rhine refused them, Thames would ruin them;
Surf, snow, river and earth
Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light;
Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the
worth,
Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers-
sweet heaven was astrew in them.

22
Five! the finding and sake
And cipher of suffering Christ.
Mark, the mark is of man's make
And the word of it Sacrificed.
But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own
bespoken,
Before-time-taken, dearest prized and priced-
Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token
For lettering of the lamb's fleece, ruddying of the
rose-flake.

23
Joy fall to the, father Francis,
Drawn to the Life that died;
With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of
the lance, his
Lovescape crucified
And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy
daughters
And five-lived and leaved favour and pride,
Are sisterly sealed in wild waters,
To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-
fire glances.

24
Away in the loveable west,
On a pastoral forehead of Wales,
I was under a roof here, I was at rest,
And they the prey of the gales;
She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the
thickly
Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails
Was calling 'O Christ, Christ, come quickly':
The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her
wild-worst Best.

25
The majesty! what did she mean?
Breathe, arch and original Breath.
Is it love in her of the being as her lover had
been?
Breathe, body of lovely Death.
They were else-minded then, altogether, the men
Woke thee with a We are perishing in the weather
of Genesareth.
Or is it that she cried for the crown then,
The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the
combating keen?

26
For how to the heart's cheering
The down-dugged ground-hugged grey
Hovers off ,the jay-blue heavens appearing
Of pied and peeled May!
Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night,
still higher,
With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,
What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed
what for the hearing?

27
No, but it was not these.
The jading and jar of the cart,
Time's tasking, it is fathers that asking for
ease
Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart,
Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds
The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer
apart:
Other, I gather, in measure her mind's
Burden, in wind's burly and beat of endragoned seas.

28
But how shall I...make me room there:
Reach me a ...Fancy, come faster-
Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom
there,
Thing that she...There then! the Master,
Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head:
He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her;
Do, deal, lord it with living and dead;
Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and
have done with his doom there.

29
Ah! there was a heart right!
There was single eye!
Read the unshapeable shock night
And knew the who and the why;
Wording it how but by him that present and past,
Heaven and earth are word of, worded by?-
The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast
Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.

30
Jesu, heart's light
Jesu, maid's son,
What was the feast followed the night
Thou hadst glory of this nun?-
Feast of the one woman without stain.
For so conceived, so to conceive thee is done;
But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,
Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee
outright.

31
Well, she has thee for the pain, for the
Patience; but pity of the rest of them!
Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the
Comfortless unconfessed of them-
No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence
Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the
breast of the
Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and
Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a
harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?

32
I admire thee, master of the tides,
Of the Yore-flood, of the year's fall;
The recurb and the recovery of the gulf's sides,
The girth of it and the wharf of it and the
wall;
Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind;
Ground of being, and granite of it: past all
Grasp God , throned behind
Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but
abides;

33
With a mercy that outrides
The all of water, an ark
For the listener; for the lingerer with a love
glides
Lower than death and the dark;
A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in
prison,
The-last-breath penitent spirits-the uttermost
mark
Our passion-plunged giant risen,
The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the
storm of his strides.

34
Now burn, new born to the world,
Double-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed,
maiden-furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of flame.
Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!
Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as
he came;
Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;
A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning
of fire hard-hurled.

35
Dame, at our door
Drowned, and among our shoals,
Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven
of the reward:
Our King back, Oh, upon English souls!
Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness
of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his
reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high priest,
Our hearts' charity's hearth's fire, our thoughts'
chivalry's throng's Lord.



Dear Lord, grant grace to the five nuns: Barbara Hultenschmidt, Henrica Fassbender, Norberta Reinkober, Aurea Badziura, and Brigitta Damhorst and the others at the the awful overtaking. Thank you Lord. Amen.

"...pray, pray to the merciful Master for help...in their final agonizing moments, since for God time is infinitely malleable, and he will have heard what the poet (and the reader) asks even now, a month or a century on:

the prayer thou hearst me making
Have, at the awful overtaking,
Heard; have heard and granted
Grace that day grace was wanted...

It is all one can do. As for those precious souls...only God can be in at the end, only the Father can help there." "Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life" Paul Mariani