A Journey With Rylynn

I had the special opportunity to take Rylynn to preschool.  Usually, if I am called to duty I pick her up after preschool and take her to daycare, but this time it was a different routine.  On this day I picked her up and took her to school.  I always enjoy the conversations we have, about family, school, things we see, and even church.  As I took her to preschool she started talking about children’s choir, she told me they were singing, “Lamb of God” and that the director wanted them to sing out.  We got to school and I told her she was going to have to show me where her room was, this routine was entirely different.  With joy Rylynn showed me her room, and her teacher greeted us.  I asked her teacher if I needed to do anything and she said no.  Rylynn looked up at me with a sense of expectation, and then I realized there was one more ritual to this journey to preschool.  I bent low and kissed my grand-daughter Rylynn and told her to have a good day.

The week ahead will beckon us to a different routine.  There will be the remembrances of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, what we celebrate on Palm Sunday.  There is the drama of the Last Supper, the betrayal, and all the other aspects that prepare us for the fulfillment of our journey, a new morning and an empty tomb, where our teacher will meet us as He met Mary Magdalene on that first Easter.  There is nothing routine about the week ahead.  We cannot come to Easter without first experiencing Good Friday and the Passion of Our Lord and joining in singing with Rylynn and all God’s children, “Lamb of God you take away the sin of the world.” 

Don’t miss the week ahead, it is a profoundly different routine that will enrich your Easter celebration and deepen your faith life.  Join the journey of this week.  There are many fine churches who would welcome you to this week of different routines, this week called “Holy”.  If you don’t have a church home, doors are open and a warm welcome awaits you.  Or if you haven’t been for a while there is no time like the present to take on a different routine. 

 

the Maker

A rainy morning such as this one, especially when rain has been so precious and rare, reminds us to look out of the window.  It reminds us that we are not after all creatures of the indoors however much the peril of winter temperature and icy wind might keep us inside.  We belong to God’s nature and not man’s constructions. 

Henry Beston spent a year living on Cape Cod and observing nature from his small home.  He paid special attention to the wildlife.  He watched the fish and the birds and saw the cyclical nature of the land and sea.  He wrote: “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.  Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.  We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.  And therein we err, and greatly err.  For the animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.” 

If it is true that we need a more mystical concept of animals and nature, then I think it is perhaps even more true that we need a more mystical concept of ourselves.  If birds and fishes can remind us of the power and majesty and completeness of God’s creation, then surely looking upon our brothers and sisters in the human race should also inspire us to praise God.  For though we might be tainted by sin and though we might live farther from nature, we are from the same ancient and beautiful place from which springs all of nature.  We are from the creating hands of God.  When we look to the beauty of the outside world we are reminded of the beauty that we all carry within ourselves; the indelible mark of our creator who has made us in his image.

On this day when mother nature refuses to let her beauty be ignored, let us remember that everyone with whom we will speak was made by a loving God.  We are all caught up together in the splendor and travail of the Earth along with every living creature, and we praise God that it is so.