For the Beauty of the Earth
Posted: Monday, May 11, 2009
by Jean Purcell
OpineBooks.com
I once tried to express in writing feelings about my favorite childhood memories of nature.
A poem resulted, which I thought was very nice. It included the tadpoles in the small pond in our yard, and the summer bugs we called June bugs.
My poem did not neglect the lightning bugs my childhood friends and I chased, caught, and kept for a few minutes in punctured-lidded glass jars. We watched them in our simple observatories, soon letting them go and noticing, once again, the racket of crickets and summer frogs.
Perhaps that was when I veered off into descriptive narrative writing, rather than poetry, which never was easy or natural for me. However, I start to digress. The main point is that many true poets have written beautifully about nature. One of them long ago penned a hymn inspired by a walk one afternoon near his home in Bath, England. The scenes around him deeply moved him, as evening sights and sounds once thrilled me outdoors. The beauty inspired Folliot S. Pierpont to write "For the Beauty of the Earth":
For the beauty of the earth,
For the glory of the skies,
For the love which from our birth
Over and around us lies;
Lord of all, to thee we raise
This our hymn of grateful praise.
His words generally express a joy in nature that even a child can understand. "The glory of the skies" speaks to every age. Whether children or grown ups, however, we cannot see beauty around us unless we draw closer to it. We must walk or stroll, not run, so that a blur of rushing does not yield only equally blurry future hours and days.
Don't we tend to rush too much? Or always? Even if our bodies are not hurrying, our minds usually are. We often act like automated snails in important areas of living, for we go so fast we get nowhere, as our spirits grow dull and rattle, our senses grow numb or stale, as imagination flies out the window into ditches or muddy creek beds!
I'm preaching to myself here. I used to risk walking across an above ground pipe in the woods near home. It ran across a small gorge. I used to make forts among vines and trees, and wade in the stream nearby. Every morning my ears were attuned to the birds awakening me, and I could smell the atmosphere of the season. I could sense what I could not describe, the season of the year, especially spring. It was childhood, a time of play, yet surely some of it came with me into the grown up world.
The writer of "For the Beauty of the Earth" must have had an experience many people had felt before; yet to him it was unlike any other. He could not give it to another person, but he could try. He thought of God at a moment of thrilling awareness of the beauty around him, and that one thought led him to write five more verses of praise of God for nature, family, and other gifts.
Do you and I appreciate that God made us to be different, yet very alike? Each of us can experience life, nature, and people; but we will experience them uniquely. Isn't that amazing to think about?
More amazing is that God, in His infinite Being, knows each of our reactions, the specific things that interest, intrigue, move, comfort, or frighten each one of us! The writer of this hymn gives a picture of a calm day, yet if he had been caught in the forest in a storm, he would have penned a very different hymn of praise. Surely the powers within nature from the All-Powerful God would have stirred extreme thoughts, feelings, and words within a burst of rain, and possibly thunder! God would have known about it, for He who sent it would have been there with him.
When we walk and notice the natural life around us, we can sense the holy around us, too. Along busy, dirty city streets there are small places with little sparks of flowering loveliness or slivers of blue heavens above. Even spring showers remind us of God's care over growth and health of the natural world.
Do you enjoy seeing stained glass church windows? From inside, light beaming through the colored glass draws special attention to saints among rocks, sheep, flowers, and sunlight.
There is a resistance to beauty and an attraction to ugliness that depicts the blight of sin as much as anything. Goodness draws us to the beauty in His creation, whether it comes like the thin air of the Alps or the cold fierceness of a desert night. The harsher the elements of creation seem to us now, in this fallen world, the more we desire the safe haven of God's care, the cleft of the rock, the shadow of wings of eagles in flight above.
The beauty, the glory, the love surrounding us drew the poet's mind to God. We can share in those words of long ago today. Lord of all, to Thee we raise a song of grateful praise!
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