It’s Saturday and today we are supposed to have a beautiful spring day – or summer, depending what you consider spring days are supposed to be. Tomorrow we’ll go back to what it usually has been: cool, with a bit of wet. Today, for sure, is an outdoors day, a day when we want to put aside the ongoing disaster that is our government.
It’s a day when we want to concentrate on the beauty of the narcissus rather than some of the more disturbing stories of the week: a Tufts doctoral student surrounded by masked ICE officers, handcuffed and dragged into a car, screaming because she co-signed an opinion piece on why Tufts should divest its holdings in companies doing business in Israel as it had on the issue of South African apartheid.
It’s a day when we want to listen to birds rather than read a statement from a Yale scholar of fascism about why he’s moving to Canada. “The world is too much with us,” wrote the English poet William Wordsworth, “late and soon/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers -- /Little we see in Nature that is ours.” But needing to recharge ourselves for the week ahead, let us touch the narcissus and listen for the birds.
Prayer for the Day
You, who summons the earth from the rising of the sun
And keeps us in your heart until the sun sets no more,
Grant that we may take this day as a sign of your mercy
As we struggle to grapple with an upended world.
Engage us into conversation with the One
Who even facing Jerusalem walked among the lilies,
In the name of the One who gives us respite,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist (1803-1882)
What delights us in visible beauty is the invisible.
Marie von Ebner Eschenbach, Austrian novelist (1930-1916)
Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.
Ascribe to the Lord the glory of God’s name, worship the Lord in holy splendor.
The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, over mighty waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
Psalm 29: 1-4