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Morning Meditation
June 18, 2025
Reading: Proverbs 8:22-31
The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth--
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world's first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race."
Meditation by Glenn Beamer
Working with our young Redeemer children for a year now, I have pondered how to bring a semblance of awe about God’s creation to our young Redeemerites, and how to connect that awe and wonder to their belief in and understanding of God in our world and God in our midst. This consideration has led me to sketch a path for the coming year in which we’ll come to understand God as the creator, Jesus as our Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit as our sustainer. I hope that this depiction provides connections and understanding for our children that they can then rely on throughout their faith lives.
The reading from Proverbs recalls God’s creation and its amazing depth and breadth. Most of us likely have been awed by our earth’s majesty and power.
After college, I went to work for Senator Jeff Bingaman during his 1988 reelection campaign in New Mexico. Few places inspire greater awe for God’s creation than the American west — the scale of the desert at White Sands, a snowstorm on the Raton Pass (in September!), the majesty of the Organ Mountains, or the colors in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains near Santa Fe compell one to recognize the enormity and majesty of God’s creation. These places inspire a veneration for God’s power to create that exceeds our human capacity.
During the campaign, I traveled to several Pueblo communities, whose first nation citizens trace their North American heritage back centuries. From these visits, I came to understand better the paradoxical nature of our faith. Members of the pueblos, particularly the Taos Pueblo, explained that their ancestors had revered God’s creation and worshiped God for the gifts of their land and nature. They had been grateful for God’s earth long before the Spanish Conquistadores showed up in 1540.
First nation people, who had subsisted in balance with nature, were forced to convert to Catholicism and “worship” God in a completely alien way. They were forced to adopt the institutional practices of the Catholic Church with which they had no natural or spiritual communion. These native Americans naturally associated their newly imposed religion and worship with the brutal power of man and men, and not with the God’s transcendent peace that their natural environment revealed daily for centuries. Yet the consequences of not subscribing to their occupiers’ Christianity were lethal.
When I went to the Pueblo communities, Pue in 1988, Pueblo members relayed how they devised and sustained their original worship by embedding elements of their natural & historic faith into the institutional practices and rites of the 16th century Catholic Church. Recognizing the brutal, and lethal, power of their occupiers, Pueblo Indians sustained their awe and gratitude for God’s creation. Many of us might perceive the Pueblos co-option of the Spaniards’ demands and force as clever adaptation. I believe they pleased God very much.
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