As Morning Fills the Sky

The prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours this morning begins with the words, "Lord, fill our hearts with your love as morning fills the sky." The metaphor of morning filling the sky resonates somewhere deep in the human psyche. Over the years I have spoken the same words to myself time and again—though perhaps only as a passing mental notation—as I rise and start each new day.

We have been given the ability—it seems—to learn about God through every human experience, regardless how ordinary, even something as mundane as the start of what may prove to be a day characterized by the difficulty of one's labor. Indeed for some it will be a day in which the sun, with its brightness and heat, will present an entirely different sort of meaning.

My reflection, as this Friday morning quickly passes by, has to do with the given of the reality of God in and through all things. Even as I struggle to find the right words while in the background there are numerous sounds and distractions, I can still experience God being communicated to me somehow in all of it.

Wisdom teaches us to find God in the experience of everything, for everything reveals the handiwork of God—everything possesses the power to communicate something of itself or its being—and somewhere between oneself and the object, person, or experience being communicated, lies the holy and divine, giving as love gives, giving meaning and purpose, filling the heart as morning fills the sky. Indeed, the believing heart knows that experience has no end for it comes forth from that which characteristically gives of itself always.

My life would be somehow much less full had I not learned to understand my human experiences as the vehicle of communication for something beyond me. The most important lesson intimated here speaks of being-in-relation to others. Above and beyond the importance of relationships per se there is the aspect of human experience, or self-awareness, that it is always presented to us psychically as being-in-relation to something else. No encounter ever leaves the other untouched or unchanged.

A question arises, but it only serves to point to the endless source of being. From where comes the power to reach into disparate lives and to meld experiences and form a meaningful whole? Every encounter, regardless of how seemingly insignificant, holds within it the love of the one who gives all things to us. Thus everything, from the tiniest to the greatest, holds the power to communicate the being of the giver.

Perhaps it is a greater love that learns to see the communication of the holy in difficult human situations—in things and in others that we might prefer not to know about, and even in that which we might consider as sin or sinner.

Indeed if the love of God is to transform the world, we must allow it to pervade in every possible experience. You and I must ask "What is God telling me in my experience—good or bad—of you?" Or perhaps our question concerns our knowledge of personal failures—they are never isolated, but are always failures in-relation.

Even where there is unbearable pain or great difficulty, such that it screams out to push away others from us, and here I think of death, disease, or perhaps disability, we must learn to recognize God's presence. It is not that such experiences must be present to know God, but that we must know God in them too. Thus we cannot reject any person or situation as unbearable to ourselves or our personal needs. Every experience is given from the depths of being, and thus every experience bears the identifying mark of the divine or holy, which is ours to see potentially.

In our encounter with the morning filling the sky there is a great deal more being said than appears before reflection. A great symphony of meaning unfolds before us each day. We must learn to listen—is this not what prayer truly is? Is this not truly the realized answer to the words "fill our hearts O' Lord?" Truly, the Lord will fill our hearts for they are hearts made to hold him.

Comments

[Ann]

This is beautifully written as well as challenging and Mother Teresa came to mind more than once as someone who very probably greeted each new day with the same or similar words in her heart. If anyone managed to find God in the most unexpected places, in the least thought of, in the despised and the forgotten, she did - and she stretched out her hand and loved each individual one - she did her very best to fill the sky of their day with love and tenderness - even when she herself walked under a cloud.

[Carol]

I can't tell you how many hundreds or thousands of hours of life I (seem to have) wasted modeling my own spirituality on Mother Teresa's seeing Christ in everyone. How, I wondered over and over. How in God's name do we see Christ in anyone, especially in someone who messes with their own kids? Was it a divine gift to her, I wondered, not given to us all? Or was I just a freak of supernature who failed to see Him? Because I never saw Christ in anyone, not even in the sweetest-holiest-- only saw themselves-- until the Holy Spirit revealed Him to me one meeting night in a priest. It was a moment of reality that was like no reality I've ever known on this earth. And then to find that Mother Teresa did not really see Christ in everyone after all? Is that what the book on her diary revealed? Hers was a true "white" martrydom, then, and she changed the world by hiding her loss, going 50 years on perhaps a memory of one of those Reality moments alone. But it underlined all I've read about the value of working with what you have, rather than what you think you ought to have. We do indeed meet the Lord in everyone, and they, in us. But if all we "see" of it is serving one another, that's good enough -- we can always ask for more. The Jesuit theology is that God is present in all things, in all the times of our lives. It's true, as you say, "everything, from the tiniest to the greatest, holds the power to communicate the being of the giver" and yet it is different for each of us,and we must indeed not only learn to listen for Him, but set time aside (prayer) to do so.