creation

Today’s Word: Vestige

Steve · September 5, 2014 · 6 Comments

Hay1 — Hay field off Ballard Branch, near Weaverville, NC. SJG photo.

St. Bonaventure wrote that all of creation is the fingerprint and the footprint of the Divine One (vestigia Dei). By definition, this “vestige” is a small reminder, a trace of something that is no longer present. So if “all creation” is a vestige of the Creator, how big, indeed, must that Divine One be? Huge. Beyond comprehension and without bounds or the ability to be possessed.

So is it any wonder we are left speechless and in awe when confronted with the grandeur of the natural world? For somewhere deep inside we know this world is merely God’s calling card, God’s way of reminding us that — although seemingly out of sight — the Divine is nevertheless as present as the rain on our nose, the sound of the stream in our ears, the smell of the rose and the taste of the fruit of the vine. And while our churches give us sacraments — visible signs of the divine in the forms of water, wine, bread, oil, hands — the world around us is an ever-living, ever-moving, ever-changing sacrament of our never-changing, ever-present God.

I spent last week in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and I can’t shake the vision of stone and tree, stream and fog, mountain and valley. I still groan in wonder when I think of the view from the top of Grandfather Mountain or the early morning veiled hay field that snatched my breath away. It was the view, yes, but it was really the glimpse that got me.

Ask yourself in silence: What in nature beckons me to see God? Where is the sacred in my life?

Today’s Word: Bee-loud

Steve · August 28, 2014 · 11 Comments

My favorite poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, begins with these four lines:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

glade — Craggy Gardens Bald, NC. SJG photo.

I always loved the sense of silence, stillness and peace that Yeats paints for us in this poem, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I was really aware of what it might be like to live in a bee-loud glade. Yesterday we hiked Craggy Gardens Trail, a path right off the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, which promised a trail to “craggy flats through a high mountain Rhododendron bald.” I had never been surrounded by the bone-like Rhododendron before, and I became mesmerized by the bare branches clawing their way skyward, seemingly dead and yet holding life in the glossy leaves at the end of their limbs. Perhaps another word for another day…

rhodo — Rhododendron in Blue Ridge Mountains, NC. SJG photo.

When we arrived at the top and walked out onto the bald of the hill, I found myself virtually encircled by bees busy doing what bees do, not caring a buzz that I was tramping through their livelihood. But the sound! It took me a few seconds to realize that the roar in my ears was the chorus of the workers. Going about their life and livelihood, I wondered if they knew the sound they made. Yeats’ words immediately surfaced and I smiled. Bee-loud glad indeed. He knew. He knew because he paid attention, as I was doing now.

So often we don’t act because we don’t think we make a difference, as if one voice doesn’t matter, as if the buzz that comes off of our lives is insignificant. But that mindset negates the power of community — of people who put their heads down and work and get the job done, of singers who lift one voice and form a chorus, of worshippers who gather around a common table and form one body in Christ. That’s the buzz of our lives, the bee-loud glade of our existence. We are not made to be alone.

Ask yourself in silence: When do I feel insignificant? When do I feel alive and part of something larger than myself?

Today’s Word: Landscape

Steve · August 25, 2014 · 2 Comments

Linville Falls, NC. SJG photo.

“Geography is simply a visible form of theology.”
– Jon D. Levenson

I’m traveling this week through the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. At the same time, I’m reading my new friend Belden Lane’s book (The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality [Oxford Press]) on the power of landscape in our spiritual lives. Belden’s book takes an especially close look at the rough and barren landscapes of the American southwest and Israel. He is drawn to these mountains and deserts (the word toou in the Coptic language stands for both mountains and deserts, I learned) just as the early church desert fathers drew inspiration from the via negativa, the negative or opposite way of thinking that uses no analogies for God since they are all “ultimately inadequate.”

In the negative space of the deserts and mountains, we come to find God and ourselves for what God and we are not. Belden writes: “Only at the periphery of our lives, where we and our understanding of God alike are undone, can we understand bewilderment as occasioning another way of knowing.”

It’s a beautiful, insightful, ancient way of thinking about God, and I have felt that sense of nothingness and yet everything important standing among the red rocks and dry earth of Sedona, Arizona. And yet, here I stand in the opposite of all that, in the resplendent and verdant ridges and valleys of the Appalachians. So where is God in all this green and fecundity, in these rivers and streams and orchards and fields? God is here, too, of course.

Belden’s book and his other writings have opened my eyes to the role that landscape plays in our spiritual lives, in the ways that we see and sense the sacred all around us. Again, he writes: “[Landscape] plays a central role in constructing human subjectivity, including the way one envisions the holy. The place where we live tells us who we are — how we relate to other people, to the larger world around us, even to God.”

view2 — Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina. SJG photo.

I don’t live here — I’m just visiting for a week — and yet this larger world around me is so big that I cannot take it all in, cannot begin to fathom the Creator and the extent of the creation. And yet I know it to be true, feel it to be truth at the center of my being. I need this landscape like I need the air that I breathe, like I need sacred scripture and the community of others and the bread and wine offered on the table of thanksgiving.

There’s nothing magical about these mountains, just as there is nothing magical in the toou of Belden’s book. We find God when we open ourselves to God, in that place where we allow ourselves to be empty enough to allow God to enter and be present. God, as Belden writes, “cannot be had.” And as the unknown author of the Cloud of Unknowing once wrote: “God is a desert to be entered and loved, never an object to be grasped or understood.”

Wherever we are, whatever our landscape, at our core we must not be possessors of God and faith but rather empty vessels, ready to receive the flowing love of an incomprehensible God.

Ask yourself in silence: What landscape speaks to me of God? Why?

Today’s Word: Plant

Steve · June 15, 2014 · 16 Comments

basil — Basil-pesto-pasta-party. All in good time.

As a child, I watched my father plant his annual vegetable garden in our backyard in urban north St. Louis. It wasn’t a big garden (perhaps 15×30 feet), but he went about the whole thing methodically and with a sense of hope for what the garden would bring. For that’s what planting a garden is all about – it’s about hope and faith, about knowing that when we plant a seed or put a small plant in the ground it will eventually become so much more.

I’ve never been much of a gardener, although something within me desperately wants to be. But about a month ago I planted a tomato plant and some herbs (basil and oregano) in containers on our back deck, the place we most like to spend time during the summer. And as I planted and watered, I realized that what I was most looking forward to was the feast – I looked ahead to that day when I would turn the basil into pesto, make one of my favorite pasta dishes, and then cut open a beautiful ripe tomato and garnish it with some fresh oregano. I saw beyond the plants to a table surrounded by friends savoring the meal. That’s the beauty of growing your own food, even on such a small scale. What we plant, we get to enjoy and share.

And so it is with all good things we bring into our lives. We get to choose these things. We decide what goes in our favorite places and how much time we will give them. But it’s our responsibility to choose well, to select things that bring long-term joy, that do no harm, that create life and shared experiences with others. On numerous occasions in the Gospels, Jesus uses the metaphor of the seed to remind us of all that is good and all that comes from him. The kingdom of God — which lives in our hearts right now and extends into our eternal future — is a seed that must be planted and cared for. It is the word of God and the body of Christ in all its forms (scripture, family, community, Eucharist) that lives and grows around us, moving us always toward a feast that we cannot quite imagine and yet continue to hope and long for.

Ask yourself in silence: What am I planting in my life that will lead to a feast?

Today’s Word: Shaped

Steve · March 15, 2014 · 3 Comments

A few weeks ago, I visited Taroko Gorge National Park in Taiwan, a beautiful forest green and marble white region in the northeast part of the Island. The views were breathtaking, and on one of our stops I found myself staring down into the gorge near the area where the Laoxi River flows from the marble valley into the Liwu River. There, the unrelenting flow of the river cuts and shapes the marble and limestone ever so slowly, as it has for millions of years. It is this constant, slow force and flow that made and continues to make the gorge what it is, slightly different with each passing day and yet seemingly unchanged to even watchful eyes.

So, too, are we shaped and formed by the flow and presence of God through our lives. Like watching an infant grow, it is nearly impossible to see the distinct changes that are happening on a daily basis, but nevertheless we are being carved out of the stone of human existence, shaped by sacred waters into something beloved by the creator. This shaping happens whether we recognize it or not, pay attention or not, believe in the carver or not. We are shaped through no effort of our own for, despite what pop psychology might want to teach us, we cannot change our true, inner selves. We can play with our exterior, surface selves that the world judges to be “us,” but only the gentle, unrelenting will and grace of God can shape and change our true, inner selves. For we are not God, no matter how we have been changed by the divine power that flows through us. God re-creates us with each passing day, ever so slightly made less so that we might be more for others.

Ask yourself in silence: How has God’s presence and power changed my life over time?