CREATION

It might be a good thing to open our eyes and see.

It is essential to experience all the times and moods of one good place. It is God’s love that warms me in the sun and God’s love that sends the cold rain. It is God’s love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God’s love that feeds me in hunger and fasting…It is God who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the woods.

As we go about the world everything we meet and everything we see and hear and touch…plants in us…something of heaven.

It is good and praiseworthy to look at some real created thing and feel and appreciate its reality. Just let the reality of what is real sink into you…for through real things we can reach Him who is infinitely real.

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him…The more a tree is like itself the more it is like Him. This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before it or after it ever did or will do.

There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility.

If I am supposed to hoe a garden or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing. To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself in God’s work. In this way I become his instrument. He works through me.

The sun on the grass was beautiful. Even the ground seemed alive.

By Thomas Merton.

Of course if a tree can give glory to the uniqueness of its creation by simply being a tree it follows that when we use that tree for our use we will use the wood carefully and with some respect. That’s what we should do. Whether our respect for the uniqueness of creation will survive our desire to possess that uniqueness is another story. As if having flooring or a piece of furniture made of wood from a rare and hard to find tree will make us rare and unique as well. That is another story, isn’t it.