Creation
Summary: Sunday, January 25-Friday, January 30, 2015
(January 31 – 100th Birthday of Thomas Merton)
God always and forever comes as one who is totally hidden and yet perfectly revealed in the same moment or event. The first act of divine revelation is creation itself. (Sunday)
Wouldn’t this be the greatest way that God could create—to give autonomy, freedom, and grace to things to keep self-creating even further? (Monday)
We pray CAC’s work draws people away from their glowing screens and out into the living, pulsing world to live lives of compassionate presence. (Tuesday)
Creation is a process that is still happening and we’re in on it! We are a part of this endless creativity of God. (Wednesday)
The inner reality of God became manifest in the outer material world. (Thursday)
There is something within us that is aware that we are here to co-create with God and make something beautiful of the world. (Friday)
Practice: A Psalm of Praise
Today is the 100th birthday of Thomas Merton (1915-1968), a man who almost single-handedly brought contemplative spirituality back to Western Christianity’s awareness. He was a Trappist monk, poet, and activist, and he was deeply engaged with interfaith dialogue. Merton wrote extensively about contemplation, and his own prayer practice “centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to His will and His love … a kind of praise rising up of out of the center of Nothing and Silence” (The Hidden Ground of Love, pp. 63-64). Here is one of his exuberant, joyous psalms:
Today, Father, this blue sky lauds you.
The delicate green and orange flowers of the tulip poplar tree praise you.
The distant blue hills praise you,
together with the sweet-smelling air that is full of brilliant light.
The bickering flycatchers praise you
with the lowing cattle and the quails that whistle over there.
I too, Father, praise you, with all these my brothers,
and they give voice to my own heart and to my own silence.
We are all one silence, and a diversity of voices.
You have made us together,
you have made us one and many,
you have placed me here in the midst
as witness, as awareness, and as joy.
Here I am.
In me the world is present,
and you are present.
I am a link in the chain of light and of presence.
You have made me a kind of center,
but a center that is nowhere.
And yet also I am “here.”
–Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 131-132
Spend some time witnessing the wonder of creation and write, draw, dance, or sing your own psalm of gratitude.
Gateway to Silence:
Bring creation to fullness.
For further study:
Christ, Cosmology, and Consciousness (MP3 download)
In the Beginning… Six hours with Rob Bell and Richard Rohr on reclaiming the original Christian narrative (CD, MP3 download)
A New Cosmology: Nature as the First Bible, disc 2 (CD, MP3 download)
St. Paul: The Misunderstood Mystic (CD, MP3 download)
Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
