-Hymn: For the Beauty of the Earth
Monthly Archives: May 2016
gardens
It started in a garden.
The Father’s agenda reigned.
Life.
Fullness of Life.
Fruit on a tree grew plump
and a lie entered with a hiss.
Darkness’ agenda spilled out
like a cup overturned.
Death.
The lush space now empty.
Exiled and saddened.
No longer able to enter.
Cut off.
A second garden.
Sweating blood and another hiss.
The Father’s agenda reclaimed.
Love.
Love that fosters Life.
A second tree.
The fruit of salvation displayed
for the world to observe at noon.
Death turned into Life.
Darkness’ agenda overturned.
A second empty space.
Alleluia, for the stone is rolled away.
‘Why do you look for the living
among the dead?’
A third garden.
Look around and see the fertile ground
desperately needing Life to spring forth.
Trees thirsty for living water,
needing wisdom to live, grow.
See the empty hearts,
hollow eyes?
Give us strength to fill them.
Fill them with the story
of the garden, tree,
and empty tomb.
Fill them with Life, Lord.
Cultivate the garden anew.
-MCS, 2013
when you don’t give the answers…
“When You don’t move the mountains I’m needing You to move
When You don’t part the waters I wish I could walk through
When You don’t give the answers as I cry out to You
I will trust, I will trust, I will trust in You”
-Lauren Daigle “Trust in You”
the whole of salvation
“Christianity is first and foremost a concern for the whole of the created order — biodiversity and business; politics and pollution; rivers, religion and rainforests. The coming of Jesus brought everything of God into the sphere of time and space, and everything of time and space into the sphere of God.”
-Bishop of Canberra, George Browning
pied beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
peacocks for pilgrims 