Life happens

        I was shocked the other morning, Margaret and I taking our terrier for her early morning  walk, to notice a large maple tree half-turned a glorious red-orange, looking for all the world almost to be on fire.   

     Nothing unusual about that, you’re thinking – and you’re right. The color comes every fall and it is stupendous and wonderful – but hardly a surprise. It just goes to show where my mind was – or rather where it wasn’t:  Fall seems to have snuck up when I wasn’t looking.  (After a long, rather slow-paced summer, September came with a roar of activity, everything happening at once, and I’ve been preoccupied with many, many things.)     

     John Lennon wrote:  “Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.”  Pretty good line, I think.  But more accurate, I believe, would be:  “Life is what happens while you’re looking the other way.”

     That is not to say that the tasks which occupy my time are not real or important.  Much of what I do is well worth doing and all of it is certainly real.  But sometimes – and don’t tell me I’m having senior moments! – you find yourself lifting your eyes from whatever has preoccupied your time and think:  Where did the day, the week, the month go?  How did it get to be the beginning of fall – when it was just the end of August? 

     Now, before you get to thinking that I am whining about being too busy, I want to tell you that’s not what I’m on about here.  No, not at all.  I am reminding myself – and anybody who cares to read this – of the pleasure and yes, Christian duty, of paying attention to the wonderful life – in this wonderful world – that God has given us.  I sometimes think that all of God’s creation conspires to wake us up.  Priest and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote these famous words of praise (excerpted from The Grandeur of God):

     The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
           It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
           It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
           Crushed.  .  .  .

         And for all this, nature is never spent;
           There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.  .  

        Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
            World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

     I hope Father Hopkins will forgive me for mangling his wonderful poem (I suggest taking the time to read the full text) – but you get the point, I hope: 

Life is precious
God’s creation is beautiful
Every day is a gift to be lived
God bless this day to you – and you to the day. 

                           --Pastor Mark