Gloaming (Days 13-16)
When the light is dim and low.
This is the fourth set of eleven posts I’m doing every four days during Lent as a sort of online devotional. These posts include poems, passages, songs, film clips, stories, and more for you to spend time with each day. They’re meant to help you think about being creative, observant, empathetic, and/or still. I will offer all of them with very little or no context.
Day 13 (March 7)
Day 14 (March 8)
A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him…The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him….
This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do….
The special clumsy beauty of this particular colt on this April day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God by His own creative wisdom and it declares the glory of God.
The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.
This leaf has it own texture and its own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonised by their beauty and their strength.
The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance.
The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God's saints. There is no other like him. He is alone in his own character; nothing else in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. That is his sanctity….
For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.
THOMAS MERTON
Day 15 (March 9)
One minute of beauty.
Day 16 (March 10)
Sandpiper
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward,
in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake.
The beach hisses like fat. On his left, a sheet
of interrupting water comes and goes
and glazes over his dark and brittle feet.
He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
- Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them
where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
rapidly backwards and downwards. As he runs,
he stares at the dragging grains.
The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,
looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
A few more moments of beauty. https://youtu.be/yCmpjtgKJNA