In science
we have been reading only the notes to a poem:
in Christianity
we find the poem itself.
~C.S. Lewis from Miracles
Science – my life’s work – fails
to love unconditionally,
to grasp the hand of the dying,
to give hope to the weak and afraid,
to become sacrifice for sin,
to offer everlasting forgiveness and grace.
Science is mere end-of-the-day footnote
to the Word extending
beyond the here and now;
an unblinking fermata
within Creation, leading into
His ultimate symphonic Work.
Try as we might to find common ground with those so unlike ourselves, it is the differences we focus on despite our efforts to understand and befriend. Whether it is cranky politicians sparring in the headlines, or the perpetual struggle between weak and strong, we miss seeing Creation’s intended balance all around us.
We can dwell compatibly, lion and lamb, without one becoming a meal for the other. Indeed, prey transforms the predator.
Even the barbed and bloody thistle releases its seeds in the cushion of thistledown, drifting gently where the wind will take it next, at once forgiven for the scars it inflicted.
May I strive to be comforting rather than prickly, healing rather than inflicting, wherever I may land.
We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.….A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
~Annie Dillard from Life Magazine’s “The Meaning of Life”
I can feel overwhelmed by the amount of “noticing” I need to do in the course of my work every day. Each patient deserves my full attention for the few minutes we are together. I start my clinical evaluation the minute I walk in the exam room and begin taking in all the complex verbal and non-verbal clues sometimes offered by another human being. What someone tells me about what they are feeling may not always match what I notice: the trembling hands, the pale skin color, the deep sigh, the scars of self injury. I am their audience and a witness to their struggle; even more, I must understand it in order to best assist them. My brain must rise to the occasion of taking in another person and offering them the gift of being noticed. It is distinctly a form of praise: they are the universe for a few moments and I’m grateful to be part of it.
Being conscious to what and who is around me at all times is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. I must reduce the expanse of creation to fit my limited synapses, so I can take it all in without exploding with the overload, to make sense of the “mess” around me and within me.
Noticing is only the beginning. It concludes with praise and gratitude.
Sunrise is an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of our nature, as if one’s whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for the new day, praise him in the name of all the creatures that ever were or ever will be.
I look at the rising sun and feel that now upon me falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen, in the Stone Age and even before it, praising God before me. Whether or not they praised him then, for themselves, they must praise him now in me. When the sun rises each one of us is summoned by the living and the dead to praise God.
~Thomas Merton from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
I’m well aware not everyone greets the morning with praise; dawn signals the start of a new day of painful relationships, back-breaking work, and unending discouragement. I know people who keep themselves up until 3 AM just so they can sleep through the sunrise and somehow find a way to start their day at noon after all hint of morning has passed.
Instead I’m one of those barely tolerable “morning” persons, waking up without an alarm, ready to rise, a song in my heart and a smile on my lips. The gift of a new day and another try at life is a source of great joy and inspiration to me.
God keeps bringing the sun back to us, day in and day out. We, His creatures, are given yet another chance.
May His Name be praised evermore.
“One tree is like another, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people–a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes.”
~Mary Oliver from Upstream
We are all built of the same stuff: atoms, amino acids, cellular scaffolding.
Yet oh so different, delightfully so.
Each one of us weeps the same salty tears.
Divinity is not playful.
The universe was not made in jest
but in solemn incomprehensible earnest.
By a power that is unfathomably secret,
and holy,
and fleet.
There is nothing to be done about it,
but ignore it,
or see.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—
his eternal power and divine nature—
have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made,
so that people are without excuse.
Romans 1:20
We weren’t conceived by random happenstance,
including so many millions not welcomed
but wished or washed away before taking a breath.
We are here because we were earnestly needed and wanted,
by a power and divinity beyond comprehension
with a capacity for love and compassion
beyond anything in our earthly experience.
We aren’t a cosmic joke,
or random couplings of DNA.
We aren’t pawns in the universe’s chess game.
We may look silly as we intentionally loll about in the smelly stuff of life,
or we may think what we say or do doesn’t matter a hill of beans,
but we are created to clearly see God for who He is,
and in whose image He made us.
He won’t be ignored;
we have no more excuses.
It is time to open our eyes,
to come and see.
He was created of a mother whom He created.
He was carried by hands that He formed.
He cried in the manger in wordless infancy,
He the Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.
~Augustine
It turns the mind inside out~
created inside His creation,
cradled within an earthly embrace by way of heaven,
bathed while cleansing the bather
filled from emptying breast to become food for the hungry.
In the beginning
the Word breathed and articulated life
with such eloquence,
knowing its utterance must
come from human lips and tongue and throat
whether as
infant’s cry,
toddler’s chuckle,
child’s whisper,
adult’s prayer of praise,
the aged’s last sigh.
We, who are ineloquent
aside from the Word,
are speechless, listening.
Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?
~G.K. Chesterton
Over a dozen times every clinic day
I ask someone:
tell me your thoughts about ending your life…
Even so~~
someone then decides what to reveal
and what not to.
I’m allowed
another day
to do my best
to be present for someone who is unsure~
and perhaps as this day dies
there will come another
when I might help someone
choose
to live another day.
Why are we allowed another day?
In a dry wind like this, snow and ice can pass directly into the air as a gas without having first melted to water. This process is called sublimation; tonight the snow in the yard and the ice in the creek sublime. A breeze buffets my palm held a foot from the wall. A wind like this does my breathing for me: it engenders something quick and kicking in my lungs. Pliny believed the mares of the Portuguese used to raise their tails to the wind, ‘and turn them full against it, and so conceive that genital air instead of natural seed; in such sort, as they become great withal, and quicken in their time, and bring forth foals as swift as the wind…’.
A single cell quivers at a windy embrace; it swells and splits, it bubbles into a raspberry; a dark clot starts to throb. Soon something perfect is born. Something wholly new rides the wind, something fleet and fleeting I’m likely to miss.
~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Whenever we have a blowing northeaster, I assumed that our snow simply blew southwest and we were left with nothing but a skiff of white here. But I was wrong. The snow and ice are sublimated, disappearing into the air as vapor.
I wish I could be so transformed, blown into something wholly new and free, not tethered and earth-bound.
Our Creator God does just that: we are so very sublime through the power of His breath.
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.
John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms:
“No man is an island entire of itself.
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
And he goes on toward the end to say,
“Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind;
therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.”
We must see this, believe this, and live by it…
~Martin Luther King Jr. from a sermon in A Knock At Midnight
Dr. King’s words and wisdom in his sermons spoken nearly sixty years ago still inform us of our shortcomings. We flounder in flaws and brokenness despite our shared global neighborhood, persisting in a resistance to serve one another in brotherhood.
We still stand apart from one another; even as the bell tolls, we suffer the divisiveness from a lack of humility, grace and love.
Perhaps today, for a day, for a week, for a year,
we can unite in our shared tears:
shed for continued strife and disagreement,
shed for injustice that results in senseless killings,
shed for our inability to hold up one another as brothers and sisters
holy in God’s eyes.
We weep together as the light dawns on this day,
knowing as Dr. King knew,
a new day will come when the Lord God will wipe tears away
from all faces and all colors —
a brotherhood and sisterhood created exactly as He intends.
Barnstorming 