The Sacrament of Creation

I am indebted to Jim Gordon in his blog livingwittily.typepad.com for this quotation from George Adam Smith writing in his commentary, The Book of Isaiah, Vol. II, p. 90.

“When the Psalmist  calls Israel to lift their eyes to the hills, or to behold how the heavens declare the glory of God, or to listen to that unbroken knowledge of the Creator which day passes to day and night to night, it is not proofs to doubting minds which they offer: it is nourishment to hungry souls. These are not arguments for the existence of a divine maker. They are sacraments.”

The use of the English language may be of a different time but his declaration is clear. We live in a sacrament.  Paul the Christian apostle adds his own conviction “Ever since the creation of the world the eternal nature and divine power of God, invisible though they are have been are understood and seen through the things he has made” Romans 1:20.

The first sacrament is Creation. The biblical sacrament is the natural world.

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Unity Unity Unity

President Joe Biden appealed for ‘unity’ in his inaugural speech.  

In the week of prayer for Christian Unity this had a special impact on me. Christian Unity has been too often mistaken for Church Unity. I have long lost the need for that but have discovered through various encounters and relationships that there is a Christian unity that transcends the carefully-conserved limits of Church structures.

And that unity arises from a deeper unity born out of the first act of creation. There is a oneness, a wholeness, a holiness if you like that transcends all our preferences, allegiances and loyalties by taking us down to the ground of our being.

The psalmist sees us ‘intricately woven in the depths of the earth’ before we are ‘born from our mother’s womb’. It is from that earthy cradle that all things as well as our desires for unity must ascend.

Thomas Merton the North American monk stated in a meeting of representatives of different religions that “we are already one but we imagine that we are not”.

We have forgotten our essential closeness by parading the badges of our politics, religions, sports teams and favoured cars and super-markets. Each may help us with our identity but they are provisional clothing for a deeper harmony.

The search for the oneness of the human soul and the healing of creation is the gift and the task of our time.

God of ancient calm

God of ancient calm let your peace still us

And your light illumine us.

God of the flowing rivers, may we discover anew flowing spirit.

God of the lonely plains, touch these empty places within us

Where we are vulnerable enough to meet you

And where we discover a new understanding

Of ourselves and the world.

This prayer was written by Peter Millar in his collection of reflections Candle in the Window 2020 prepared during the first national lockdown.

As religious buildings stay shut or allow curtailed access their limitations become apparent. However loved or venerated they might be they have been rendered insignificant during the pandemic. Whatever faith you or I may follow has had to survive beyond their reassuring familiarity.

A church-bound faith leaves God in the building. Yet as Peter’s prayer reminds us; in the words of Paul of Damascus ‘ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made’.

He is the God of flowing rivers and lonely plains and also city parks and window boxes. A God of calm lakes and surging winds. A divine song truly sings in conjoined stars and the constant re-shaping moon.

So God bless the walkers and the climbers, the landscape watchers and the beach-strollers, the leaf-kickers and the muddy-field trudgers.

May he speak in the nature of things to our fears and our hopes for 2021.

Farewell Jonathan Sacks

I was distressed to read of the death of the former Chief Rabbi.

He inspired my understanding of the Old Testament and taught me to treat those books as the Hebrew Scriptures.

He also addressed the needs of the country through the experience of being a Jew in post-war Europe. His death in the season of Remembrance is poignant.

Some quotations from his Reith Lectures sum up the man. He never moved form these generous insights

‘God has created many different paths for faith to find him but only one world to live on’

‘After Babel, there is no one universal language which alone comprehends God, such that those who do not speak it are excluded from salvation, redemption or truth’.

‘The influence of religions lie only in the force of their example, the cogency of their teachings and the spiritual beauty of the lives they inspire’

Religions must maintain a critical distance from the values of the age’.

He defended the importance of Religion in a time when Spirituality seems more important.

Locked-in landscapes

 

Why is it that when I am told I cannot travel that I long to travel?

Why is it that having been told that I cannot enter Wales I long to be walking in the Brecon Beacons?

What strange obstinacy has arisen in me that the more I self-isolate the more I must walk familiar landscapes?

From I to We

The Bible commands us only once to love our neighbour. But it never tires of urging us to love the stranger’.  Jonathan Sacks

Fear not the dark

 

 

 

I am re-reading my journal. It has the title ‘Horizons’. I have discovered that I have recorded these five quotations about darkness. They are tantalise me and lift my spirits (paradoxically)

I can see clearer now

 

 

I love horizons.

 

A COVID-19 Question

Just what are we worth?

Colin Morris died 20 May 2018. He was a Methodist minister who lived and proclaimed the Gospel with a distinctive voice and at times controversial views.Through broadcasting  he continued the Soper Tradition within Methodism of speaking truth to the power for the future good of society. The following comes from a broadcast in 1990 about the significance of being made in the Image of God:

 I am not a naked ape or a handful of dust or an evolutionary accident;

I am not a speck on a cinder floating in outer space,

nor a fifteen-digit number on a computer card.

Now are we children of God, says the New Testament writer John,

and it doesn’t yet appear what we shall be.

What about that for an open future?

It’s worth remembering those words in moments

of aloneness, despair and self-doubt.

The image of God, conformed into the likeness of Christ;

that is our cosmic dignity and our destiny.

And it’s ours for the asking.     

For me it is far too early to draw many conclusions from the experience of COVID-19. However it makes me wonder who we believe ourselves to be. Once we lose our significance society may come to believe that we have no value and so might we. Morris is  exploring the question: just what are we worth?

The talks were later published in one of his books Starting from Scratch published by Epworth.

 

 

And Jesus was like a breath of fresh air

 

Once upon a time in Jerusalem there was a church and Jesus blew through it like a breath of fresh air.