THE POPE'S MONTHLY INTENTIONS - July 2014
- Universal Intention - Sports. That sports may always be occasions of human fraternity and growth..
- Evangelization Intention - Lay Missionaries. That the Holy Spirit may support the work of the laity who proclaim the Gospel in the poorest countries.
- http://www.apostleshipofprayer.org/
Receive, Recognize,
and Contemplate God in his Creation
This large canvas by Theodor Schüz (†
1900) illustrates a family at prayer before a rustic repast during the harvest.
A bygone era—indeed, an entire civilization—is evoked here that anyone under
fifty cannot have known. It is a civilization born some ten thousand years ago
on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates through the reconciliation of
shepherd and farmer. It grew up in Israel, burgeoned in Greece and Rome. Later
it came to full flower in the Christian West, as its countryside was cloaked in
churches, chapels, and oratories as with a beaded mantle. This was a
civilization in which Creation itself placed its faith in God the Creator, in
which life was intrinsically based on community. Though old as time, yet it has
just expired before our very eyes.
As a child not all that long ago, I
was fortunate enough to live in the heart of that civilization while it was
still thriving. I was that little boy standing in prayer on the right of the
painting. I tied sheaves, I built haystacks. I learned what prayer is in the
school of immaculately-coated Charolais cattle which, at the first tinkling of
the church bells, would stop unbidden for the Angelus. And I can attest that
daily communion with Creation disposes his children toward their Creator.
Schooled to the rhythm of seedtime and harvest, the parables of the Lord spoke
directly to my heart and shaped my understanding. Through the passage of the
seasons, all the Christian feast days seemed to me like so many celebrations of
a truly living reality: the convergence in our lives of the sacred and the
profane. And all the hours of the day and night didn’t seem long enough to me
to give thanks for the fact that the Savior had come on earth to complete the
work of the Creator. Paul Claudel well grasped the vital importance of this
revelation of Himself with which God imbued nature, so that it could speak to
us of Him—and of our own destiny within his providential plan. For Claudel
placed these words in the mouth of Joan of Arc: “It was the linden tree in
front of my father’s house that, like a great white-surpliced preacher in the
moonlight, explained everything to me.”
Like Joan, it was contemplation of
Creation that explained everything to the child I was then. Everything? Well,
everything that really counts: that which is good, that which is true, that
which is beautiful. Faced in our post-modern societies with the abolition of
all this—the good, the true, the beautiful—faced with the abolition of man
presenting itself almost as a pious work, I too long for those moonlit lessons
of great preachers in white surplices.
www.magnificat.com
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