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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
November 6, 2024
Reading: Ecclesiasticus 43:23-29
Those who sail the sea tell of its dangers,
and we marvel at what we hear.
In it are strange and marvelous creatures,
all kinds of living things, and mighty sea monsters.
Because of the Lord each of his messengers succeeds,
and by his word all things hold together.
We could say more but could never say enough;
let the final word be: “He is the all.”
Where can we find the strength to praise him?
For he is greater than all his works.
Awesome is the Lord and very great,
and marvelous is his power.
Glorify the Lord and exalt him as much as you can,
for he surpasses even that.
When you exalt him, summon all your strength,
and do not grow weary, for you cannot praise him enough.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
The poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) wished for herself this summary statement: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.” Those who have wandered through her work would say that, without question, she lived into this desire. In a review of her posthumously published book, Devotions, it was aptly noted that “Oliver is a poet of quiet reflections, of taking time to stand and stare, of embracing opportunities, however small, and finding worlds in them, in a good old-fashioned earnestly American manner. ‘It is what I was born for’, she [wrote], ‘to look, to listen, to lose myself inside this soft world – to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation’. Her focus is always on ‘the ordinary, the common’. ‘I do not live happily or comfortably,’ [she said] ‘with the cleverness of our times.’”
In Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day” she observed that:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Her reviewer then added that lines like these need no exegesis. The reader either agrees or doesn’t. Explanations won’t help. I think this is exactly right.
The same holds true for the verses from Ecclesiasticus. They need no clarification; they only need to be read with attentiveness. For they position us both in accord with who we properly are and with who God is. And apart from all the tiresome exaggeration that is so much the practice of our times, making everything spectacle, the writer allows us to recognize a very different and edifying kind of ecstasy in our acknowledgement of the wonders and mysteries of the world – simple present things that we can’t tame or conquer.
We have been inundated for months with weaponized language that, in one direction or another, has been meant to trouble and unsettle us. It would be naive to simply want to wish this away. Real issues are at stake. But words that are loosed from the fundamental expression of amazement and thanksgiving quickly become harmful, inciting resentment, anger, and exclusion. And anxiety and despair stem from the haunting sense that we don’t have words enough, or words that are adequate enough, to protect us from what we fear.
How important, then, is the reminder that the only lack we truly suffer is not being able to express the praise for all we are given. I imagine that few would think this at all relevant given the polemics that are so existentially threatening us; but if you read the Ecclesiasticus text carefully and openly, a certain untangling seems to begin.
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 from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen
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