Sunday
We have not honored God’s Presence in the elemental, physical world. We made God as small as our own constricted hearts. Why pretend only we deserve God, and that God is not for other groups, religions, animals, plants, the elements, Brother Sun, and Sister Moon?
—Richard Rohr
Monday
One gets the sense from this Genesis account that the Creator enjoyed making the world. The work of creation stretched out over time in order for the Creator to receive maximum pleasure. God’s creation-work is leisurely and sedate, unlike most Western capitalist modes of industrial creation. —Randy Woodley
Tuesday
Whole people see things in their wholeness and thus create wholeness (“holiness”) wherever they go and wherever they gaze. Holy people will find God in nature and everywhere else too.
—Richard Rohr
Wednesday
Reverence does not happen once per week; it is practiced each day faithfully, moment by moment. It is acknowledging that we are dependent on the systems of life.
—Sarah Augustine
Thursday
Move your mind in the direction of the living God who is infinite holy mystery. Look toward God as the unimaginable personal Source of all beings, the very Ground of being, the Beyond in our midst, a generative ocean of love, Creator Spirit.
—Elizabeth Johnson
Friday
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe that the world was created by one God. It would seem to follow therefore that everything, everything without exception, would bear the clear imprint and likeness of the one Creator.
—Richard Rohr
Week Forty-Two Practice
Praising Dawn’s Light
Nothing draws me into the arms of God more fully than standing here before the world starts its whisper.
—Barbara Mahany
Author Barbara Mahany writes of the religious call to notice and to praise God at dawn:
Every Abrahamic religion has written the day’s rising of light into its prayer code, beginning with the ancient Judaic command to consecrate the new day with the Birkot Hashachar, fifteen blessings for the dawn spelled out in the Talmud, starting with thanks to God for the rooster’s “ability to distinguish between day and night.”
In Islam, the muezzin keeps watch for the first crack of light on the eastern horizon, and beckons all believers to the dawn prayer, the Fajr, technically the day’s third call to prayer since the Islamic day begins at sundown….
In Christian monastic fixed-hour prayer … the sacred pause is called lauds, the coming of the light. Brother David Steindl-Rast … distills the holy message of lauds to the notion that each sunrise, each new beginning, is a never-ending gift. In turn, in response to this unasked-for benevolence, our reciprocity is to ask ourselves, “What gift might I bring to this day?” [1] …
Thomas Merton, who called the first light “a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence,” as the birds in the bough begin their tentative chirping and an ashen moon departs, railed against inattention to dawn’s beckoning:
Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. It is wide open. The sword is taken away, but we do not know it: we are off “one to his farm and another to his merchandise.” Light on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves cooking. Electric shavers filling radios with static. “Wisdom,” cries the dawn deacon, but do we do not attend. [2]
O Lord, let us attend. Let us not lose the taste of its spell, not one droplet of this holiest hour.
References:
[1] See David Steindl-Rast with Sharon Lebell, Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey through the Hours of the Days (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses Press, 1998, 2002), 30, 34, 40.
[2] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965, 1966), 117, 118.
Barbara Mahany, The Book of Nature: The Astonishing Beauty of God’s First Sacred Text (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023), 116, 117, 119.
Image credit and inspiration: Jennie Razumnaya, Blooming Peach Garden (detail), 2022, photo, Los Angeles, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We’re invited into the beauty of creation, receiving and offering, just like this artist painting the petals of a cherry blossom.
