RBWords - Volume 23 - Number 6: June 2010
Something to Think About
As I write this, I am sitting at a window on the coast of Oregon near the village of Yachats, south of Newport. Friends whose marriage I celebrated back in 1975 in Denver, CO, have invited me each year for the last few years to come for some vacation time and a kind of retreat period. Since I usually come around the 4th of July holiday, the weather is usually very good. What captures my daily attention, however, is the Pacific Ocean, which is about a minute’s walk from the house. The sound of the surf is continual and when the tide is coming in, the spectacle of the waves crashing on this rocky portion of the coast is amazing and inspiring. I am put always in mind of the line from one of the Psalms, “Greater than the roar of mighty waters, more glorious than the surgings of the sea, truly is our God on high!” I spend a lot of time walking on the path along the shore above the huge rocks. The immensity of the ocean has the effect of putting me in God’s presence in a special way. Somehow it’s a bit more “manageable” to me than the mind-boggling photos from the Hubble telescope which periodically appear in National Geographic magazine or on the internet.
Although it is good spiritual advice not to base one’s life of prayer on one single geographic feature to the point that prayer becomes impossible if one is not located in a particular place, I find this annual visit to be a very important feature of my “spiritual year.” I suppose my spiritual response to the natural setting could put me in the current of some of the “new cosmology” thinking that is going on and which I know very little about as of yet. I go only as far as the psalms and other scriptures that remind me that “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness…” or “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” I am in a place that makes me grateful for it all and praying all the harder that the oil spill in another part of the world will be cleared up so that God’s message will ring out in the glory of creation. IT’S SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT.
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It Has Been Said
And in this he [God] showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.
From SHOWINGS by Julian of Norwich