Slideshow image

Let Me Live Grace-fully

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.    Psalm 19:1-4

It is summer, the days are filled with sunlight, the nights with radiant sunsets and quiet calm.  I hold on to this against the backdrop of fire, smoke, upheaval and on going COVID wariness.  If I listen only to the news, read only the newspaper I am exhausted. With the recent UN report on Climate Change I am so aware of my need to be an accountable and responsible  caregiver of God’s creation.  So, I open no more than the necessity to open myself to the fullness of God’s revelation; to the wisdom of scripture, to faithfully following  Jesus, and to embracing the sacred text of all creation.  Eriugena, an early Celtic mystic believed that the whole of the natural world is like a sacred text, a  living text which includes the great luminaries of the heavens, the sun, moon, and stars; the earth, sea, and sky; the creatures of all these realms; and the multiplicity of life-forms that grow from the ground. We need to read both books, he says, the sacred text of scripture and the sacred text of the universe.  If we read only the text of the Holy Bible (the small book) we will miss the vastness and wildness of the utterance, everything vibrating with the sound of the divine.  If we read only the text of the universe (the big book), we are in danger of missing the intimacy of God’s voice, for scripture calls us to faithfulness in relationship, including faithfulness to strangers, refugees, widows, and the poorest among us.

With my small book in hand, I allow myself to melt into the web of creation,  into a slowness of time, of opening myself to relationship.  Alexander Scott, another Celtic mystic, says the awareness of the sacred that we access in nature is not a doctrinal or propositional knowing, it belongs ‘to some deeper part of the human being.’  It is the way lovers know each other, with their whole beings, heart and mind, body and soul, know the spiritual in the physical.  ‘Forms, colours, motions, sounds’ – it is through these that we encounter the presence of the divine….this is the value of the sun, moon and stars, of earth and sea, of trees and flowers, of the bodies of men and women, the looks of human countenances, the tones of human voices.’ It is through these that the divine is made known to us.

May you be blessed with encountering God’s revelation deep within your soul, through the love of Jesus, holy scripture and creation’s living revelation.

A summer prayer by Ted Loder:

Let Me Live Grace-fully

Thank you, Lord 
For this season
Of sun and slow motion,
Of games and porch sitting,
Of picnics and hummingbirds and dragon flies
On heavy purple evenings.
And praise for slight breezes.
It’s good, God,
As the first long days of your creation.

Let this season be for me
A time of gathering together the pieces
Into which my busyness has broken me.
O God, enable me now 
To grow wise through reflection,
Peaceful through the song of the cricket,
Recreated through the laughter of play.

Most of all, Lord,
Let me live easily and grace-fully for a spell,
So that I may see other souls deeply,
Share in a silence unhurried,
Listen to the sound of sunlight and shadows,
Explore barefoot the land of forgotten reams and shy hopes,
And find the right words to tell another who I am.

Photo by Esther Tuttle on Unsplash