Lectio Divina - Arrested by Beauty

Yesterday it was hard not to notice nature.  After a week of hot, muggy, unmoving air, air that you could see as a stale haze, that you could feel in your throat, yesterday was a day of wind-borne freshness. 

The evening before, windows that had been shut to keep out the heat and humidity were now opened wide to receive the cool, dry air.  It had been a great night for sleeping, awakened from dreams to hear the wind in the late-summer trees, their stiffening leaves resonant messengers. 

The sun rose in clear air and a cloudless sky, the East Bay a spectral kaleidoscope, blindingly golden as I looked northeast into the just risen orb, and
indistinguishable grades from gold to deep blue, Caribbean blue/purple/gray/green as I turned to the southwest.  I decided that the world was most beautiful when lit from behind me, as if I were looking not at God’s own blinding brightness, but what God saw, what God’s brightness illuminated, what God pointed out to me. 

But by noon, I was looking up into the brightness, finding the most beauty there.  The sun was bright green, undulating now through a leaf, now deeper green, where leaves overlapped, or three, or four, or God knows how many, the wind moving the trees into a dance of the blessed spirits, arms lifted, toes unmoving but on point, to  be closer to the sky, arms reaching, pliant, flowing.

I recalled a time when I was in college, when I had driven from my summer job at home in Chicago to my room above a garage at Marygrove College, in the back of campus, the last building, adjacent to a quarter-acre woods.  It was about this time of year, and it was this kind of day.  I remember turning off the hot road into campus, turning the corner of the large brick building and seeing/hearing the trees.  The sun was behind me.  The wind was coming from everywhere, converging on those tall old trees, elms, maples, oaks, indistinguishable from each other unless you really looked close, like dancers on a crowded floor seen from heaven.

I recalled a time sitting on our front porch steps on Warrington in Detroit on one of the first days of spring, when free from the long winter inside, it felt so good to sit out in the air, the freshness of it delicious in my nose, my mouth.

There is a method of prayer called lectio divina, that entails reading until something moves you, and stopping there, taking it in, perhaps reading it over and over until that holy thing has entered you and done with you what it will, when it and you become as indistinguishable as those trees’ leaves, or the dancers on that huge floor, as the sun and the water while looking into the summer sunrise.  And perhaps the beauty of it is that at some point we realize that we have not taken it in at all, the leaves, the sun, the passage of words; it has taken us in, and we have allowed ourselves to be taken in, to be swept into it, to be one.

Somehow we are, aren’t we, inclined to busy ourselves, to be so preoccupied by past or future that the present moves imperceptibly through us, or around us.  Praised be God for dappled things, indeed, for waves dapple with sky, for sky dappled with leaves, for wind that wakes from our sleep-walk, and calls us to the intimacy and relationship of life.

Even in this crescendo of joy there is in me an undertone in a minor key, a reminder that I am surrounded by this beauty at every moment, in Kathy, in the cries of the poor and the squeals of children, in the sounds and sights of a world dying and being born.   Why is this dance with divinity something reserved for “special” moments, when we are arrested by the flash of beauty?

Pied Beauty - Gerard Manley Hopkins

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;	5
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:	10
Praise him.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.