Wednesday, May 13, 2009

The natural world at worship

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Sometimes I think we are way too anthropocentric - about a lot:

The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God. This leaf has it own texture and its own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength. The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance.

The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s saints. There is no other like him. He is alone in his own character; nothing else in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. That is his sanctity.

-- Thomas Merton

(I wonder what Thomas Merton would think of what we have been doing to the earth since his death in 1968.)

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