Mtr Taylor Devine

Dear friend,

In Ordinary Time when saying the Daily Office, one has more options for “antiphons” – short pieces of scripture that bookend the Invitatory Psalm. One of them is a piece of scripture from Psalm 24, “The Earth is the Lord's for he made it,” followed from the customary “Come let us adore him.” This little snippet of scripture is an important one to me. I love to seek God in nature through hiking, quiet contemplation outside, going to joyful outdoor concerts or events. I love the way that the sunset or a beautiful mountain (or ranges of mountains encircling Tucson) can be evocative and make worship, prayer, adoration of their maker the obvious response. But it’s not just in the face beauty that we might have that visceral response, and it’s certainly not just beauty to which this Psalm seems to refer. Creation out of chaos is characterized by order and grace but as we well know, also fallen, broken, painful structures and doldrums of life.

In re-reading “Being Christian” by ABC Rowan Williams I got rather stuck on just page 5 which reads:
…You might expect the baptized Christian to be somewhere near, somewhere in touch with, the chaos in his or her own life – because we all of us live not just with a chaos outside ourselves but with quite a lot of inhumanity and muddle inside us. A baptized Christian ought to be somebody who is not afraid of looking with honesty at the chaos inside, as well as being where humanity is at risk, outside. (p. 5)

Baptism in to Christ leads people not only to be in the "middle of human suffering and muddle but in the middle of the love and delight of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit...That surely is one of the most extraordinary mysteries of being Christian. We are in the middle of two things that seem quite contradictory... And because Jesus has taken his stand right in the middle of those two realities, that is where we take ours. (p. 7)

This sense that in this world that is at once beautiful and so broken, Jesus leads us into deeper and deeper humanity is cause for that same "wow" that would make you say with awe, "the Earth is the Lord's for he made it."

In Christ,
Mtr. Taylor