It is a glorious privilege
to live, to know, to act, to listen, to behold, to love.
To look up at the blue summer sky;
to see the sun sink slowly beyond the line of the horizon;
to watch the worlds come twinkling into view,
first one by one, and the myriads that no man can count,
and lo! the universe is white with them;
and you and I are here.
~Marco Morrow
It is God’s privilege to conceal things and the king’s privilege to discover them. ~Proverbs 25:2 ✝
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Our area, that had been desperately in need of rain, was the beneficiary of fortuitous events on Christmas Eve. Could it be that the celebration of the Messiah’s coming the night before was what prompted the blessing of rain as well as the magical, miracle of snow. So many voices were lifted up in praise and worship of Him that our petitions for rain might have been heard as well. Occasionally on cold, crisp wintry days or nights layers of snow blanket God’s creation even here in north central Texas, but this time we received a strange mixture of “wet” goodness. At eventide sparkling stars punctuated the ancient moon in heaven’s blackened dome, but during the course of the Messiah’s birthday, clouds laden with moistures moved in, flashes of lightning lit up the sky, a good amount of rain was garnered, hail fell, and finally snow covered the landscape. If this is not an assortment of Divine providence mixed with earthly “enchantment,” then as Priestley says, “where is such to be found?”
Praise His Holy Name!
A Ming vase can be well-designed
and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone.
I don’t think this can be true for photography.
Unless there’s is something a little
incomplete and a little strange,
it will simply look like a copy of something pretty.
~John Loengard
The annual beauty in a garden once spent is gone forever, except in memory, if not captured in some way. A camera is one of the ways we who love nature’s fleeting glory take it captive. Unlike Loengard, I believe photos can be more than just an uninteresting copy of a beautiful thing. For example part of what you see in the photograph above started out as that of a single rose. However, as an experiment with some computer technology, I turned the image into something “a little strange,” as Leongard suggests, and it added another level of interest. If one looks carefully at the altered image, fragmented pieces of what used to be negative spaces in the original photograph now have merged into engaging patterns, and so what can be seen raises questions about how much one really sees. “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see,” claimed documentary photographer and photojournalist, Dorothea Lange. So it is that Hawthorne’s idea could be applied to my rose or his trees or to the reflection of anything, and it would speak a profound truth. We often don’t see what is right under our proverbial noses. The eternal underlies everything mankind sees, tastes, hears, touches, and smells, so much so that all things seem to quiver from the Divine energy emitted from them. But it’s only when the Lord’s demure presence is acknowledged that it becomes more and more keenly perceptible.
So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. ~2 Corinthians 4:18 ✝
A man should hear a little music,
read a little poetry, and
see a fine picture every day of his life,
in order that worldly cares
may not obliterate the sense of the
beautiful implanted in the human soul.
~Johann Wolfgang Goethe
In her novel, THE COLOR PURPLE, Alice Walker says she thinks God gets angry if a person walks by the color purple and doesn’t notice it. At one point in her story the main character, Celie is told to look at the purple flowers and to embrace their beauty in spite of all the pain and suffering in her world. She is urged to see the good in them because it was God who placed them on earth. As she comes to this realization for herself, she begins to understands the magnitude of God’s grace, and like the purple flowers, blossoms as she gains a respect for God and life.
It’s obvious that God puts a premium on beauty, not only for His own sake but also for ours. Since we are made in His image, our souls cannot help but be implanted by a “sense of the beautiful” as Goethe suggests. As a highway sign points us in the right direction, in the same way loveliness points to God’s heavenly realm and His goodness. If we can find beauty, then we can find God. Beauty is meant to feed us spiritually, and the Lord uses what’s beautiful to speak to our hearts for His divine purposes. For example notice all the richness and beauty involved in the scriptural telling of the birth of the Christ child. It starts with a beautiful star that leads the way to a manger. For Celie her beautiful flowers led her to God’s grace, and the Christ child brings all who follow the star and Him the same gift of redeeming grace.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we’ll try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.
~William Cullen Bryant
With every north wind that blows the landscape unravels more and more; after each assault the downed foliage leaves in its wake mounting numbers of skeletons bracing themselves for winter’s icy blasts. In addition the ornamental grasses are drying out and taking on their a wild and tattered look, and yet a few touches of color remain in the leaves and flowers that have yet to be exiled. Still audible in the “honey’d leavings” of warm afternoons are their faint renditions of the lusty songs of life, but regardless of how sweet the sound of that is, the sands in autumn’s hourglass are running out. Like all things, it too will come at last to its Sabbath and therein rest until its next appointed hour upon life’s stage.
Water, the Hub of Life.
Water is its mater and matrix, mother and medium.
Water is the most extraordinary substance!
Practically all its properties are anomalous,
which enabled life to use it as building material for its machinery.
Life is water dancing to the tune of solids.
~Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Seldom do I see a body of water that it doesn’t seduce me with its wiles into a meditative reverie. In that quiet stillness I feel drawn to peer down into its mysterious depths until imagined or perhaps real images of earth’s origins come alive. Water seems to possess in all its forms and properties extraordinary qualities so otherworldly that the phenomena of water reaches down and touches pools in “the temple of the inner being.” While looking into its depths an unmistakable awareness of the Divine’s presence surfaces and holiness rises like a mist. Gauzy reflections in water quiver and quake as if they possess a life of their own.
Although I know not where it rests in the human psyche, I believe somewhere therein mortals remember their watery beginning and recognize familiar things not of this world, things they know without tutelage or reason. In the same way a child instinctively recognizes its biological mother after the umbilical cord is severed, I believe we, who are separated here from the Source of our being, retain a sense of His parenting presence because we are of the Lord and inextricably a part of Him.
Sacred Touches 