I Love Paris in the Springtime
/Scripture
For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us …. was not ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, but in him it has always been ‘Yes’. For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ. And so through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken by us to the glory of God. (2 Corinthians 1:19,20 NIVUK)
I Love Paris in the Springtime
“It’s as if God has given up on running the universe and has settled into His new gig writing a planetary sitcom.” (Cathal Kelly, Globe & Mail, May 29, 2017) You may have noticed that Paris and climate change have been in the news lately. Whatever your views on the issue, I think Kelly’s sardonic comment gets at our puzzlement about the world’s politics.
Housing for our own poor, continuing health and economic adversity in our Indigenous communities, famine in Africa, hundreds dying in areas of the world that don’t get our media attention – the list can continue as we operate in our own comfortable bubble.
Yet our stewardship of the earth and its inhabitants is our highest calling as humans who love and serve the Creator of it all. The poem/prayer for today gets at how central this is connecting us in the earthy and the infinite. It is the infinite “Yes” for us. May God grant us wisdom and passion to do good for Creation.
Prayer
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
(E.E. Cummings 1894-1962)