A.N. taught us, in those grand short days when we were all his little flock, that walking outside is one of the best ways to lead ourselves into contemplation and prayer. Last night I ran down to the lake for my health, and as I turned to walk back saw a sight that proved him right.
Light in its full glory overwhelms us, but dimmed and disentangled into separate colors, light grants us to gaze on and imbibe it without fear of hurt. Yesterday's sunset, of a musty pink and lavender hue, was just then embracing the lake and drawing out an answering glimmer. It was too dark to see the laughing splashing family that was leaving the water, excepts as anonymous human figures, without race or time, and their comfort and cheer framed the glow of the sky and the water. I held out my hands for a moment, my gesture of aknowledgement to God for any beauty I find, and turned to walk back up the hill toward our appartment. The Evening Star shone clearly, alone in the hazy half-dark heavens. I walked and walked, taking the long road home. As I crested the final hill, a street lay before me, brick buildings and solid trees coming into view. It struck me suddenly how material everything was and I prayed,
"In days gone by nothing was more natural to the human race than to see Your divinity in everything, even when they didn't know Who You are. Now it's more difficult. Our society has so conditioned us that we can hardly help but feel that it's somehow quite improbable that You are really behind all this..."
I looked up again and stopped in the road. Venus shone clearer and brighter than before as night continued to settle over our land. I thought of a poem that I often recite to her. Tennyson lived in the Victorian era - that time of progress and stiff virtues and evolution that somehow managed to kill off God and invent sex (the hymns and sentiments of which, incidentally, are beloved of fundamentalists and her daughters. ) He, like most educated people in his time, struggled hard to keep his faith. I do not know whether he succeeded or not. But when he thought of death he said,
"Sunset and Evening Star
And one clear call for me..."
and concluded
"I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar."
It came to me as I gazed why Tennyson would have said "clear" and "call" when looking at that Evening Star. It reminded me of Shakespeare's phrase about something else - "the ever fixed mark." Venus' increasing strength of brightness and sharpening clarity is very like a call when you look for more than a few moments. Fantastically far, colossal, permanant, and lovely beyond our reach, she commands a tiny lone human hurrying along one of a million roads to pause, to come, to realize, to kneel and confess.
Now, I've recently discovered a wonderful website, The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, that's making available and searchable on the web sixty thousand pages of published and unpublished Jonathan Edwards material, directly from the manuscripts in the Yale Library (they have a long way to go yet, but it's free in the meantime.) I had read there yesterday a little miscellany called "Fall" and as I started again to close the distance to my door, knowing my husband was waiting for me, I repeated the opening line to myself:
"Seeing that the beauties of the corporeal world consist chiefly in their imaging forth (of) spiritual beauties..."
Edwards, who knew more than any of us about the benefits in walking outside while praying, saw much beauty in the natural world, though he considered it a ruin of its former glory. To him it was a given, a presuppostion, that all physical beauty was "imaging forth" a greater spiritual beauty.
Taking the time to gaze, muse, and pray may resurrect that impulse in our own hearts more easily than we suppose.
Light in its full glory overwhelms us, but dimmed and disentangled into separate colors, light grants us to gaze on and imbibe it without fear of hurt. Yesterday's sunset, of a musty pink and lavender hue, was just then embracing the lake and drawing out an answering glimmer. It was too dark to see the laughing splashing family that was leaving the water, excepts as anonymous human figures, without race or time, and their comfort and cheer framed the glow of the sky and the water. I held out my hands for a moment, my gesture of aknowledgement to God for any beauty I find, and turned to walk back up the hill toward our appartment. The Evening Star shone clearly, alone in the hazy half-dark heavens. I walked and walked, taking the long road home. As I crested the final hill, a street lay before me, brick buildings and solid trees coming into view. It struck me suddenly how material everything was and I prayed,
"In days gone by nothing was more natural to the human race than to see Your divinity in everything, even when they didn't know Who You are. Now it's more difficult. Our society has so conditioned us that we can hardly help but feel that it's somehow quite improbable that You are really behind all this..."
I looked up again and stopped in the road. Venus shone clearer and brighter than before as night continued to settle over our land. I thought of a poem that I often recite to her. Tennyson lived in the Victorian era - that time of progress and stiff virtues and evolution that somehow managed to kill off God and invent sex (the hymns and sentiments of which, incidentally, are beloved of fundamentalists and her daughters. ) He, like most educated people in his time, struggled hard to keep his faith. I do not know whether he succeeded or not. But when he thought of death he said,
"Sunset and Evening Star
And one clear call for me..."
and concluded
"I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar."
It came to me as I gazed why Tennyson would have said "clear" and "call" when looking at that Evening Star. It reminded me of Shakespeare's phrase about something else - "the ever fixed mark." Venus' increasing strength of brightness and sharpening clarity is very like a call when you look for more than a few moments. Fantastically far, colossal, permanant, and lovely beyond our reach, she commands a tiny lone human hurrying along one of a million roads to pause, to come, to realize, to kneel and confess.
Now, I've recently discovered a wonderful website, The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, that's making available and searchable on the web sixty thousand pages of published and unpublished Jonathan Edwards material, directly from the manuscripts in the Yale Library (they have a long way to go yet, but it's free in the meantime.) I had read there yesterday a little miscellany called "Fall" and as I started again to close the distance to my door, knowing my husband was waiting for me, I repeated the opening line to myself:
"Seeing that the beauties of the corporeal world consist chiefly in their imaging forth (of) spiritual beauties..."
Edwards, who knew more than any of us about the benefits in walking outside while praying, saw much beauty in the natural world, though he considered it a ruin of its former glory. To him it was a given, a presuppostion, that all physical beauty was "imaging forth" a greater spiritual beauty.
Taking the time to gaze, muse, and pray may resurrect that impulse in our own hearts more easily than we suppose.
***
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