Before the marvel of this night
Adoring, fold your wings
and bow,
Then tear the sky apart
with light
And with your news
the world endow.
~ Jaroslav Vajda
Last Sunday and Monday I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Christmas concert at Bethlehem under the direction of Bill Beckstrand. The music was entirely beautiful and the carol written by Vajda, which I quoted above, is in particular enchantingly beautiful as well as spiritually moving. The concert was so wonderful I thought what a pity that it was only an hour and a half long. I could have sat much longer in the presence of all that beauty and talent. Afterward I went out into the crisp winter air and witnessed the starry sky silently chanting its own beautiful carols. And I thought about the congruence between what had just happened in the sanctuary and what was happening outside. There is poetry and harmony that surrounds us at all times. It is up to us to listen and then venture our interpretations. Let me explain.
I find it very interesting that in the opening line of the Nicene Creed it speaks about God as “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.” The word “maker” is the Greek word poietes, a maker or a builder. What the poietes constructs is the poiema, from which we get the word “poem.”
The metaphor used by the creed is that of a worker or “poet” who produces something that is lovely in itself, that has some kind of meaning, rhythm, cadence, form and beauty of its own. In time the Greek word poietes shifted meaning from a maker of a house to the maker of literary forms. And that is the meaning the English terms “poet and poem” came to have. Is it a theological stretch to say that God is the poet and the world is the poem? I don’t think so. We see beauty and meaning all around us.
So, have you been reading any good poetry recently? I was up the Gunflint Trail last week and was overwhelmed with the beauty of snow-draped fir and spruce. The trails through the woods were inviting. There was a story written in new snow.
First, I saw the slow rhythm of the moose track, stately and regally move across the dusted road. Then I saw the pizzicato scurry of the mice and vole prints cut across the large prints, only to be interrupted by the stalking footprints and the headlong pounce of the fox into the snow bank. These motifs played out repeatedly beneath a stand of poplars snapped off twenty feet above by a wind we remember, now surrounded by a crush of pioneering balsam telling a story older than our memories of cycles and systems and webs God put in place in the beginning of the poem.
Last summer on a canoe trip with youth from our church, we portaged into South Arm of Knife Lake and walked through a grove of large cedar trees next to falling water. The trees were clothed in green moss. Mike, the other adult leader, was excited to go back for extra trips on that portage. Was he reading the "poem" a second and third time? I think so. It seemed the more he "read," the deeper his appreciation became. I am sure everyone reading this has many of those important places where the "poetry" of God has moved him or her.
This is a season of intense meaning. I pray that many will take every opportunity to listen well to all that God has to say. Attend your church, visit a new sanctuary, join the angels’ songs.
“He who made the stars
in the heavens,
He who fashioned
the earth and the sea,
From time eternal,
He was Alpha and Omega, He.
Behold, behold, your Lord!”
from Climb to the Top of
the Highest Mountain by
Carolyn Jennings
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. For December, our contributor is Reverend Mark Ditmanson of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Grand Marais.
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