Psalm 93:1-5
The Lord is king! He is robed in majesty. Indeed, the Lord is robed in majesty and armed with strength. The world stands firm and cannot be shaken. Your throne, O Lord, has stood from time immemorial. You yourself are from the everlasting past. The floods have risen up, O Lord. The floods have roared like thunder; the floods have lifted their pounding waves. But mightier than the violent raging of the seas, mightier than the breakers on the shore—the Lord above is mightier than these! Your royal laws cannot be changed. Your reign, O Lord, is holy forever and ever.
They might be
able to pick out their father, or name their uncle and his cousins entirely
based on family resemblance, but it’s a guess, not a memory; they weren’t there
in 1950.
My children’s children
(and grandchildren) have no first-hand knowledge of what their parents were
like before they were born. And so on.
The memory we all have
of the time before our time exists, resting entirely on the faith we have in what we are told, and by whom it is who tells us.
In the same way, we can
only imagine eternity. And it somewhat hurts
the head to do so. If you’ve ever tried
to imagine nothingness, as if nothing existed, such as Genesis suggests, you understand this head-hurting
activity:
The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. Genesis 1:2a
Pondering eternity can
produce a wide range of emotions among the vast possibilities; we can get
overwhelmed with awe for the vastness of time and space. Depression is also
possible, because of the prospect of an unanswerable line of questioning about
our beginning; to think deeply and run into the same, frustrating answer, we’ll see, or maybe is a sure formula for a straight jacket.
And those straight
jackets come in many colors and sizes.
Of the many ones we put on, (perhaps as an intentional insulation
against the cold, dark, reality of our questions being unanswerable) is the
common agnostic approach, simply throwing hands up in the air, admitting: well…no one can really know how it all began; you can’t
prove God or creation, or something nobody was there to see…so why bother even
thinking about it? Some like to think that is an “intelligent”
position of accepting your losses and moving on.
Nonetheless, the quest to
know from whence we trod remains fundamental to humankind, because we desire to
know purpose, the WHY of our existance. To NOT at least ponder these is to live in a
shallow pool of self-importantance.
Enter – the loveliness
of faith.
Somewhere in the
deepest crevices of our being, even deeper than DNA, and more pronounced than
personality, there is singing a song of our origin, the music and message of
our Creator’s love. This song calls out
to the individual from within. It cries
a thornbird’s gift as Fr. Alfred McBride wrote:
“The bird out-carols the lark and the nightingale and the world pauses to listen. God smiles with pleasure at the captivating melody. What is the message of this sacrificial music? Life's most satisfying moment can be purchased only at the price of great pain – so says the legend.[1]
Christ on the cross, was
our thorn bird. This was Father God’s
precious gift that causes our souls to sing, All glory to the dying lamb…sweetest
note in seraph song.[2]
For You Today
You have no memory of the creation, or Christ’s cross, or even your great-great
grandfather; you DO have a song of faith waiting to be sung…an eternal song.
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