There is a song, I’m told, from the Diné people (or Navajo) that says:

“Sometimes I go about feeling pitiful. And all the while I’m being carried on great winds across the sky.”

I learned this first years ago, when I happened to have been going about feeling pitiful and someone older and wiser than I saw this and told me, “Look, just be sure that every day you lay on the ground and watch the clouds pass.” I didn’t know what else to do, so I tried it. And you know what? It worked.

It’s one of those things that children naturally do, that we give up in adulthood to our peril. Yesterday my daughter and I were out sledding, and ended up laying on the snow watching the clouds pass. We noticed tiny shining points of light in a V moving high across the sky: Geese, catching the sun. As we watched, this winged congregation of living day-stars ribboned their way against the blue and through billows of clouds to the horizon. When we sat back up and noticed the trees again, and the land rolling in snow, and the people pulling their sleds, smiling, my daughter said, “Oh, I forgot where we were.”

No matter what we are going through, it is so important that we have ways of reminding ourselves that we live within a much greater immensity of existence than our usual limited scope often cares to admit. We all live and move and have our being, as it’s said in our scriptures, within the Eternal Spirit of the transcendent and sacred source of all life – the Holy One Whom we refer to, if we must use a word, as God.

When we feel this embrace within a sacred immensity, even in a small way, our often constricted and self-revolved view of things can dissolve and our strivings and anxieties can ease, knowing, trusting, that there is indeed a peace of Christ that surpasses understanding, surrounding our hearts.  

The reality of Holy transcendence is humbling, very humbling – for who are we really, we realize, but small and brief creatures. But the reality of Holy transcendence is also deeply comforting. As long as we are willing to release our ego and trust a higher holy power.

In a cosmic scope, we are humbled, so that in a cosmic embrace we may be held. For we are each and all beloved creatures, rendered in love by our Holy Creator, our souls carried on great winds across the sky.

What helps us to remember this?

For so many, it’s the experience of beauty. It’s the experience of love, or of feeling our relations beyond ourselves, with the beings of the wider world of creation, with other people, both living and dead, a glimpse of our place in the wider wheeling of the seasons, the rise and fall of forms and lives through generations past.

Being in the natural world so often helps. So many of us naturally feel an openness and humility, a wonder before the holiness of the more-than-human world of creation.

The Psalms of our scriptures are full of stunning evocations of God’s presence through the mountains and seas, the heights and depths, the teeming abundance of life on earth, its cycles of flourishing and death, decay and decomposition, seeding and nourishment of renewed life. And through it all, beyond it all, the Holy One moves and resides in stillness.

It also helps to contemplate the presence of the divine through deep time, which is one of the gifts of a mythological imagination:

Hear this from the poet Robert Lax, who was an American contemplative Christian writer. (from “Circus Days and Nights”):

In the beginning (in the beginning of time to say

The least) there were the compasses: whirling in

Void their feet traced out beginnings and endings,

Beginning and end in a single line. Wisdom danced

Also in circles, for these were her kingdom: the sun

Spun, worlds whirled, the seasons came round, and

All things went their round: but in the beginning,

Beginning and end where in one.

And in the beginning was love. Love made a sphere:

All things grew within it; the sphere then encompassed

Beginnings and endings, beginning and end. Love

Had a compass whose whirling dance tranced out a

Sphere of love in the void: in the center thereof

Rose a fountain.  

The stories in our scripture help us to get a glimpse a bit of that View of Eternity, a glimmer of God’s eye’s view of things. There are ancient cycles turning today, as they’ve turned in the past, cycles of death and rebirth, of loss and renewal. Civilizations, species, have come and gone as the earth wheels around the sun.

And through the changes, our ancient faith sings of the faithfulness of our Creator, who creates the world out of love. God’s faithfulness has held through all the changes and upheavals of history. The Covenant that God will provide new life and new horizons of possibility for those who commit to the Laws of Life and Faith and Love and Justice.

So contemplating scripture is a good practice, come what may.

As is taking time to honor our connections to beloved community, those we love and who love us, as well as those we have loved and who have loved us, both living and dead. Remember we belong to a wider inheritance of care and commitment received from our ancestors whether within biological or chosen family, the lineages to which we feel ourselves belonging.

Then there is the tried-and-true practice of prayer.

It’s amazing to me how people have shared with me about times when they just called out to God, because they didn’t know what else to do, and called out even if they weren’t so sure what it meant, if there was a “there” there … and they received a response of consolation. Not necessarily a cure, but a consolation – a humbling sense of somehow being held.

At its heart, prayer is simply the practice of evoking the Divine and placing ourselves in relation with that Divine. This is enough.

Here are the words of Martin Laird, a scholar and teacher of contemplative prayer, at Villanova:

“Communion with God in the silence of the heart is a God-given capacity, like the rhododendron’s capacity to flower, the fledgling’s for flight, and the child’s for self-forgetful abandon and joy. If the grace of God that suffuses and simplifies the vital generosity of our lives does not consummate this capacity while we live, then the very arms of God that embrace us as we enter the transforming mystery of death will surely do so. This self-giving God, the Being of our being, the Life of our life, has joined to [Themselves] two givens of human life: we are built to commune with God and we will all meet death.”

(From “Into the Silent Land: The Practice of Contemplation” pg. 1, by Martin Laird)

And here are the words of Thomas Merton:

“In prayer we discover what we already have. You start from where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize you are already there. We already have everything but we don’t know it and don’t experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already have.” (From “Into the Silent Land,” pg. 53)

This is why if something we go about feeling pitiful, all the while we are being carried on great winds across the sky.

And this why, my friends, in all things and through all things, come what may, it is right and good to remember to invite in God. When we evoke the Divine, we can be reminded of a much wider mystery, a cosmic scope, that can humble us, but also a universal love that holds us as we are.

For this I give thanks to God.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, January 21, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge

Image by Rene Tittmann from Pixabay