Presence

I pause for a moment and think of the love and the grace that God showers on me: I am created in the image and likeness of God; I am God’s dwelling-place.

Scripture

Sirach 47:8-10

In all that he did [David] gave thanks
to the Holy One, the Most High, proclaiming his glory;
he sang praise with all his heart,
and he loved his Maker.
He placed singers before the altar,
to make sweet melody with their voices.
He gave beauty to the festivals
and arranged their times throughout the year,
while they praised God’s holy name
and the sanctuary resounded from early morning.

The first Book of Chronicles elaborates on this passage:
So all Israel brought up the ark of the covenant of the Lord with shouts, with the sounding of rams’ horns and trumpets, and of cymbals, and the playing of lyres and harps (1 Chron 15:28).

Reflection

The sanctuaries of our churches – indeed of our bodies – no longer “resound from early morning”. When did any of us ever think to praise God with “dancing and leaping” as David did? When did we last sing and make melody to the Lord with all our heart as Paul recommends in his letter to the Ephesians? Or “clap our hands” or “shout for joy” as the Psalmist describes? We tend to regard this kind of worship as primitive, outmoded. Although we were created body and soul, modern man is disembodied in his ritual. Laughter and play are conspicuous in their absence from our worship, despite the fact that we were created playful. Wisdom – the first of all creation and God’s endless delight according to Proverbs, was “at play everywhere on [God’s] earth”.
Worship for many of us is a thing of leaden seriousness; for our children it is all too often an incomprehensible tedium. If anyone shouted with delight in the presence of the Lord in the tabernacle, the Ark of our times, they would be put out of the church very quickly!
Yet it is the child in us who can most truly live in a state of becoming – untrammelled by the past, always open to growth and change. It is the child in us who can sense what Meister Eckhart calls the perfection and stability of eternity, where there is neither time nor space, neither before nor after, “but everything present in one new, fresh-springing now where millenniums last no longer than the twinkling of an eye”.
It is the child in us who can truly be open to God’s constant invitation to be born again, to be part of the creation which is itself constantly being recreated. It is the child in us who can thrill to a sense of closeness to the source of all creation. Without a sense of wonder, our praise of God will be sterile.

Prayer

Lord, it is too easy to live in the created world as though in a transparent capsule – seeing, but feeling no sense of identity with, creation. There have been so many times when I have felt no real sense of being constantly in the Creator’s presence, let alone belonging there; no sense of interconnectedness with the rest of creation. I glided along the surface of the spinning earth, never listening to its heartbeat. Today, as the date of your birth gets closer, with joy in my heart, I will pray two of the great Psalms of David, Psalms 63 and 100.

Amen

Glory to you, Father, source of all being,

to you, Jesus, Word made flesh,

to you Holy Spirit, Comforter,

as it was before time began,

is now and shall be into the future.

Amen.