Morning Devotion for the Season of Eastertide
April 25, 2022
Invitatory
On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.
Alleluia. The Lord is risen indeed: Come let us adore him.
Reading: I John 1-4
We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us— we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
Meditation – Peter Vanderveen
The writer Brian Doyle once, very aptly, described his sentences as “diving boards, not news reports.” He didn’t feel that written descriptions should be ruled by grammatical constraints: too much of the world, if rightly noticed, overwhelms the tight and tidy rubrics of sentence structure. He wanted his readers to jump in and slosh around and “sing of adoration for all the whistling, sobbing, surging creation” – and, if so for the world, then, even more so for God. This, for example, is his first sentence, in a poetic essay on God.
By purest chance I was out in our street when the kindergarten
Bus mumbled past going slow and I looked up just as all seven
Kids on my side of the bus looked at me and I grinned and they
Lit up and all this crap about God being dead and where is God
And who owns God and who hears God better than whom is the
Most egregiously stupid crap imaginable because if you want to
See God and have God see you and have this mutual perception
Be completely untrammeled by blather and greed and comment,
Go stand in the street as the kindergarten bus murmurs past.*
This observation doesn’t have to be rolled into a single, rambling sentence; but it’s much more powerful as it gains momentum without being interrupted by periods. It captures the dynamism of kids and life and arguments and God in one sweeping expression. How good is that.
The same is true of the first verses from the First Letter of John. The opening sentence refuses to be stopped by periods. You may not have noticed. We’re not used to reading Scripture with an eye to its creativity, much less for how its grammatical structure informs the meaning. We tend to read it like a news report, and one that’s very, very old news indeed. It’s no wonder, then, why it doesn’t capture us. But John’s opening sentence is much like Doyle’s. It starts with a simple declaration of John’s experience of Jesus; but then it shifts to how that experience was also a revelation of God’s own presence; and then it shifts again into how that experience of God constitutes the fellowship of the whole church. It could have been expressed much more prosaically. Each part could have been made into a bland statement of a matter of fact. But this would have removed the spirit from the text: its restlessness; its dynamism.
And John wants us to dive in, for only in doing so can “our joy be made complete.”
Brian Doyle’s writing never fails to arouse first smiles of recognition and, then, the joy of seeing again the fantastic mystery of the creation, life, and God. One sentence alone shows this. Scripture often works in exactly the same way. We just have to learn to jump rather than dutifully take note.
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
* From: Doyle, Brian. One Long River of Song . Little, Brown and Company.
