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Prayers from nature week two:     Where the heart makes room for Grace
  
When we began our vacation up island, I knew we would be spending most of our time outdoors and I wanted to use this time to open myself to God ‘s presence through his beautiful creation.  I had no preconceived ideas, just the willingness to be open.  And a path unfolded.  From the beginning, standing in a river, marveling at the beautiful rocks in the riverbed, a silence overcame me, pulling from me a song of gratitude, filling my heart with peace, evoking prayer.  As the days passed the theme of quiet, peace and prayer deepened.  I began to feel I was on some sort of a pilgrimage.
 
A pilgrimage is walking with intention – the intention of being attentive to the sacred, the presence of the Divine.   In Port Hardy I found a library book on pilgrimage:  The Road is How – A prairie pilgrimage through Nature, Desire, and Soul by Trevor Herriot.  Herriot embarks on a three day walk across Saskatchewan through the Qu’Appelle Valley.   I wasn’t walking across a prairie, but I was walking along rivers, beaches, along with canoeing and flying over lakes and ocean.  In many ways a pilgrimage is a walking prayer. It doesn’t matter where you are walking, it just matters that you pay attention to the stirrings of the Holy Spirit.   Over the centuries many spiritual writers have said that prayer begins with attention.  Herriot’s pilgrimage through nature was to find God’s peace in his restless soul, “whether sitting or walking [meditation] lets me rest in the natural great peace between my thoughts.  That space…. where the heart makes room for grace.”  In our busy, noisy world, often completely detached from silence, from nature, even from God, our souls are restlessness.  We yearn to be in relationship, connected to community, to God.
 
Herriot writes, “I felt…the road’s contemplative welcome…offering its abiding invitation: read what you find here, meditate, pray, and ponder.”   St. Benedict called this form of meditation lectio divina, and as Herriot points out, the text to be read was scripture not life at the roadside: first read, then meditate, then pray, and finally contemplate.  But like Herriot reading the text of creation became for me a form of lectio divina.  I don’t know if I would have thought of this on my own, but it felt deeply familiar.  Years ago, a friend and I made a pilgrimage of walking four hundred kilometres of The Camino over fifteen days.  Our world slowed down to a walking meditation.    Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher captured the spiritual road in this quote: “To compare life to a road can indeed be fruitful in many ways, but we must consider how life is unlike a road.  In a physical sense a road is an external actuality, no matter whether anyone is walking on it or not, no matter how the individual travels on it – the road is a road.  But in the spiritual sense, the road comes into existence only when we walk on it.  That is, the road is how it is walked.” 
 
In Port Alice the silence grew.  Here you hear the flapping of raven wings as they fly overhead, the laughter of eagles as they soar through the air, the lap of waves on a distant island, but mostly you hear the silence of the mountains and trees towering above the sea; “let me rest in the natural great peace between my thoughts.  That space…. where the heart makes room for Grace.”  In the silence, in the great peace between my thoughts, is a profound feeling of being in relationship with God through his creation.  One of my favourite poets Mary Oliver wrote a short poem about an encounter with a hawk, entitled “The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, but the Attention that comes First.”  Herriot reflects that being here and awake enough to see the hawk (the eagle) is our real prayer, a way to widen that space for heart, room enough to grow out of our self-absorption, addictions, and neuroses.   Attention to God’s presence. Attention that precedes prayer.  Jesus walked with attention, lived a life of attention to God and God’s presence in all of creation.  May we be blessed to be attentive, to find the peace between our thoughts, where the heart makes room for Grace. 
 
N. T. Wright in his new course on the Psalms labelled Psalm 8 as the Mystery of Being Human. Now more than ever, it is a mystery that brings great responsibility, the need for prayer, and the blessing to find the peace between our thoughts, where the heart makes room for Grace. As Thomas Berry wisely said, may we be blessed to see all of creation as a communion of subjects not a collection of objects.
 
 
Mystery of Being Human
Psalm 8     NRSV
 
1 O LORD, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory above the heavens.
2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants
you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,
to silence the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under their feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the seas.
9 O LORD, our Sovereign,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
 
 Photo by Lars Kuczynski on Unsplash