God's Grandeur

 

Someone reported that while leaving the state of Maine this week he could detect the first whiff of autumn in the air. Then I stumbled on this picture of a lightly frosted red leaf. Let us pray for autumn rain as the ground is dry, the rivers, aquifers and reservoirs need re-filling after this extraordinarily hot and dry summer. 

I have always had an appreciation for plants and animals. I planted seeds with my mother as a very young boy and had a vegetable garden carved out of a corner of the backyard. When I was a new priest I had a pretty big garden behind the parish school and escaped there mid-afternoon for an hour or so. One teacher said to me, "All the kids in this school know of you is that you're the gardener priest." She wasn't being kind. Licking my wound someone said to me, "Not bad, better being thought of as a gardener priest than the alcoholic priest or the high-living fancy car priest or the abuser priest."  Now I take care of a public garden by the train station and the low walled garden in an old church cemetery. 

George Harrison said, "Everyone should have themselves regularly overwhelmed by nature." Pope Benedict said at World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia in 2008  "It is as though one catches glimpses of the Genesis story — light and darkness, the sun and the moon, the waters, the earth, and living creatures, all of which are 'good' in God's eyes. Immersed in such beauty, who could not echo the words of the Psalmist, in praise of the Creator, 'How majestic is your name in all the earth.'"

So ready or not, autumn is coming — a uniquely lovely season. All the seasons say, "We can change" And we do need to change, don't we? Now they are selling child sized (real) guns. I could despair, but I saw Monarchs on the verbena and zinnias this week, and a goldfinch teasing seeds out of the coneflower, and the hundreds of bees and wasps continue to forage on the mountain mint. And a young mother brings her little boy to the garden every morning so he can kiss the cement "bunny" garden ornament. How dear is that?!

This is St. Paul's good advice, and his time was as crazy in it own right as ours:

"Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things."  Philippians 4:8

 

Saturday in the Easter Octave: "And God made the seasons."

Warm and Bright ~ Photograph: Jeriff Cheng

And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth."  (Genesis 1:14)

This verse recounts the fourth day of creation in the Book of Genesis: God created the seasons. We might think the author had in mind the four seasons we're accustomed to: Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. But an ancient agricultural Chinese Calendar,  watched the movements of nature so closely it envisioned twenty-four seasons. And while it acknowledged solstices and equinoxes, it looked more deeply, seeing movements within the water, air, the animals and plants. China is a vast country and so the calendar was not accurate for all parts of the country. We can imagine local adjustments were made. 

This calendar invites us to be more observant and reflective. Here are the approximate dates and the lovely seasonal names assigned to each bit of time and change: 

January 6 ~ the cold begins
January 20 ~ the coldest time
February 4 ~ spring begins
February 19 ~ the rains begin
March 5 ~ the insects and animals awaken
March 20 ~ night and day are of equal length.
April 4 ~ the time of warm and bright
April 19 ~ the rains helpful to grow
May 5 ~ summer begins
May 20 ~ the seeds of summer begin to grow
June 5 ~ the wheat grows ripe
June 21 ~ the longest day and the shortest night
July 7 ~ slight heat
July 22 ~ thunder storms begin ~ the hottest time
August 7 ~ autumn begins
August 23 ~ the heat hides
September 7 ~ dew begins
September 22 ~ the middle of autumn
October 8 ~ the dew is very cold
October 23 ~ frost descends
November 7 ~ winter begins
November 22 ~ the lesser snow
December 7 ~ the greater snow
December 21 ~ the shortest day ~ the longest night

I'm thinking of the yellow Coltsfoot of yesterday's post - it blooms only for a short time. We could call that flowering time a season. A season could be marked by the spring sound of the peepers which began chirping like clockwork last night (check out the post for April 14, 2015). We could create our own personal seasons of gratitude.