O Lord, our Lord,
how glorious is your name in all the earth!
You have exalted your majesty
above the heavens.
Out of the mouths of newborn babes and infants
you bring forth praise
to protect creation against your foes,
to silence the enemy and the
avenger.
When I look up at your heavens,
all
that has been
formed by your fingers,
the moon and the stars
that you set in place,
what is humanity that you are mindful of them,
and
human beings that
you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little less than the angels
and crowned them with glory and
honour.
You have given them dominion
over the works of your hands,
and placed everything under their
feet:
all sheep and oxen
as well as the beasts of the
field,
the birds of the air, the fish of the sea,
and whatever swims in the paths
of the sea.
O Lord, our Lord,
how glorious is your name in all
the earth!
Reflection
When you step outside at night, especially outside the city – past the city’s artificial glow, the congestion, and the constant traffic hum, and you look up at the sky, clear enough to see the stars in their unending wonder spread out as far above and around you as you can see, what do you feel?
I remember that Wayne Child’s favourite hymn was “How
Great Thou Art.” We played it at his funeral, and I can’t help but imagine he
thought of it every time he was up north at his brother’s wilderness hunting
and fishing lodge:
Oh Lord, my God, when I, in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art …
For myself, even just on our back deck on the edge of Dundas, when I stand under the night sky, I feel contentedly part of something bigger, far more vast than myself. I feel connected deep down to all that is, ever was, and ever will be, with nothing lost along the way. I feel myself and all I’ve ever known, held within a great embrace, cared for, even loved.
This isn’t everyone’s experience, though, and not what everyone feels. Edward Shillito, an author who wrote and lived through both the First and Second Great Wars, and saw how the terror and tragedy of those years affected people, once wrote, “The heavens frighten us; they are too calm; in all the universe we seem to have no place.” This vastness and cold distances of the cosmos can trigger a kind of vertigo – a feeling of homelessness and utter vulnerability, when we realize the cosmos does not revolve around us.
Some years ago, Rosalia Bohonis lent me a book written by a survivor of the plane crash in the Andes that claimed the lives – in terrible ways, of most of the members of a Brazilian soccer team that he was a member of. As he and a few others were able to wander, stumble and agonize their way through that frozen, forbidding mountain range, the image he came to have of God was of a being far removed, cold and impassive, and not at all intimately engaged in his well-being.
I wonder if that’s the way many people feel in society at large these days. Does it seem that we face issues and problems too big to be managed? That the forces of the world are somehow against us? That the powers are distant and uncaring? And that really, we are on our own – small and anonymous, to survive as best we can?
It’s the kind of feeling that might trigger freedom convoys. The kind of powerlessness to effect big change that makes people hunker down all the more happily into private Shangri-las. The kind of anxiety about our own well-being that can drive us to become acquisitive, possessive, and wanting to bend the world if we can to our own design – make it suit us, rather than us have to fit into, and live in harmony with it.
In our fear of not counting and of not being counted, we are sometimes led into exactly the kind of chaos that the Bible says God in the beginning had to overcome and call into order, in order to make the world be. The kind of self-centred jumble that ever since has remained the greatest enemy to the world – a constant threat to undo what God has made good.
And it’s so strong, so common, and so much a part of
how the world works these days, that when Stephen Mitchell, a poet, translator and religious scholar, published
his version of fifty of the Psalms from the Old Testament, he expressed the
last part of Psalm 8 this way:
…what is man, that you love him,
and woman, that you gladden her heart?
Yet you made us almost like the angels
and crowned us with understanding.
You put us in charge of all creatures
and placed your whole earth in our hands:
all animals, tame and wild,
all forests, fields and deserts,
even the pure air of the sky,
even the depths of the ocean.
Unnamable God, how terrible
is our power on all the earth!
It’s quite a different ending from what the Psalmist is led to express. In the original and ancient version, after affirming that God has made us just a little lower than the angels in giving us dominion over all the earth – making humanity a kind of lieutenant or under-study to God, empowered and taught to love and care for Earth as God does, the psalmist ends with a positive word of thankful praise: “O Lord, our Lord, how glorious is your name in all the Earth.”
And the thing is, both are true and honest. Both the modern despair for the fate of Earth, and the ancient praise for the glory and grace of God in making all things and raising us up as lovers and stewards of the Earth God has made. And the question is, which we – which I, will choose to live by and live towards.
For myself, as much as I lean by nature and habit towards the aloof and the separate, the analytical and even cynical, the fearful and self-protective way, there is something in me that yearns for and wants to choose the way of openness and engagement; to be part of what’s around me, rather apart from it; and to give and share myself for the well-being of all, rather than try to save myself from being immersed in it.
And I’m told by those who seems to know, that the way – at least, a way to do this, is to learn to live – or maybe more accurately, to allow myself to live, with a sense of awe and wonder at what is before me. With a sense of astonishment. An ability and a willingness to be surprised by the glory of what it is in front of me, which comes only by taking the time to actually look at it, and see it for what it is, what is in it, and how I – how all of us, are part of one single, gracious, sacred reality.
I’ve recently been
introduced to a poet named Mary Oliver, and I wonder where she has been all my
life. And why no one told me about her
before. In a poem called “Messenger,” she writes:
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird –
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.
What do you think? Is that the kind of open wonder, the kind of unrehearsed awe, the kind of simple astonishment known by babies and infants, and shared with us in their wide-opened eyes, their simple smiles, their gurgles and chuckles of delight at what is given and is all around them?
And is that the life-saving wisdom and the world-saving way that the psalmist says we need to grow down to, that we need to rediscover as a bulwark, as a defence against the fear-driven, self-centred chaos that always threatens the undoing of what God has made?
So, just a few questions: what in this world makes your heart tremble in joyful praise of God, and makes you fall to your knees in humble thanksgiving?
What in the world reminds you of the immensity and vastness of what God has summoned into being?
What in the world overwhelms you with beauty and leaves you speechless?
What in the world can you not help but see as a vessel of God’s glory filled to overflowing, and overflowing into the world?
And when you think on and look at these things, how do they invite you to be in the world that is given?
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