For the leader; “upon the gittith." A psalm of David.
LORD, our Lord, how awesome is your name through all the earth! I will sing of your majesty above the heavens with the mouths of babes and infants. You have established a bulwark against your foes, to silence enemy and avenger. When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you set in place— What is man that you are mindful of him, and a son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him little less than a god, crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him rule over the works of your hands, put all things at his feet: All sheep and oxen, even the beasts of the field, The birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and whatever swims the paths of the seas. O LORD, our Lord, how awesome is your name through all the earth!
Today it has been a struggle to focus on prayer. Too many interruptions, too little focus. I settle in to listen to Ceol Sona to help me settle into a prayerful space. I prefer silence but I prefer contemplative music to the sounds of life and people around me. It is not yet warm enough to work outside so here I will sit and gaze out my window to the world space that is mine to inhabit.
His name is awesome throughout all of the earth. From the expanse of the Burren of Ireland to the top of Mt. McKinley, to the depths of the Grand Canyon, to the vastness of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Not just in those places but also in soaring forests of the rain of the Olympic Peninsula, the sweeping north prairies. His awesomeness reaches from the sky to the tips of the Bitterroot and Pintler mountains down the mountain sides into creeks and into the Big Hole River, from there on to the Jefferson, from there downstream to the Three Forks where the Missouri begins and then to where it joins with the Mississippi to mysteriously and ponderously flows past New Orleans to the Gulf. His awesome is not just in nature but there are also towering skyscrapers in New York, the immensity of Los Angeles,
the charm of Bar Harbor and the deep history of Boston. These are just some of the places where my eyes have seen the awesome. There are more, more than I can imagine any more than I can fathom the expansiveness of space.
I marvel and cherish the memory of all that I have seen, touched, smelled, heard, felt and experienced. More than I deserve but for the tender mercy of a loving creator. There is all of that to be mindful of but what holds my faze and attention this afternoon is just one towering Cottonwood tree out of the many that surround me. As yet there is no color showing but dryness in the rustling of the leaves in the gentle breeze blowing. There leaves more numerous than I could being to imagine, countless branches both living and dead. Earlier squirrels stopped raiding my feeder long enough to chase each through the branches back and forth and up and down leaving huge limbs bouncing and swaying from them landing on them at high speed.
Meister Eckhart said that if we could genuinely imagine all there was to know about a tree, we do not need God, we would be God because only God can take in everything contained in just one tree. I will appreciate what I can grasp but not contemplate further. To do so would be to enter into mystery not from a sense of awe and wonder but from an intention to possess what cannot be held in the human mind. We are so gifted to be so loved and given so much. Gratitude seeps in and floods around me. We are nothing but yet are elevated to be in his image. How wonderful. How unknowable. How awesome.
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