Oh loving Father in heaven. You are a glorious, mighty
God and yet all can come to you as little children, in the name of your beloved
son Jesus, and call you father.
May we as adults, growing older, keep the vision with
which we first became aware. May we keep our delight in the start of each new
day and the peaceful sleep at night knowing we are in your loving hands.
We praise you for the rhythms of nature sustained year
after year. Winter, spring, summer and autumn; day and night; and wind, rain
and snow. Clear days with brilliant sun; days of gathering clouds and gusts of
wind.
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| Bluebells by Jeanetta |
For the falling orange-gold leaves we thank you Father,
and for the new leaves that spring from dry branches in the spring. For the sunlight
making patterns on the grass, sending diamonds of light onto the green.
We
thank you for the changes of light with which you have showered us - the dawn,
gentle at first and then dazzling, then softening again in the evening with the
radiance and colours of unending daily sunsets.
Thank you for the light on clouds, white, grey and deep
blue-grey changing and touched by dawn and sunset.
The stars Father, the stars, they are too beautiful yet
far away in the deep blue-black of the night and the changing moon from a
crescent to the full roundness of silver light.
How you have used colour great artist! The redness of a
rose, full blooded and warm, the bright yellow of a nasturtium, the blue of a
delphinium. What gentle care made the pansies? There are faces painted on
pansies; their shining faces look up from their beds in the earth. Each leaf of
the variegated ivy seems to have a different brush stroke.
The sharpness of the strelitzia growing like a beautiful
bird on its heavy stalk;
the morning and evening birdsong; the fish in the water;
the birds and insects in the air and on the ground. The hallelujah shout of
colour from the bouganvilleas.
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| Strelitzia by Cheryl |
Within each colour range there is variation, so many shades
of green, delicate sweeps of mauves and grey on far off mountains, with a
palette of red, brown fertile earth and ochre grass. And the earth, which you
have made with more breadth of variety and wonder.
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| Lily pond by Claude Monet |
Artists have painted landscapes through the ages which have
given us new glimpses and appreciation of your stunning, magnificent earth. The
sunsets of Turner, the dappled shade of Monet; I think of the rules of
perspective with wonder too, Father, such as the largeness and smallest of your
animals and insects and dare I say, touches of humour.
And then you gave us the rivers and the seas. Father the
magnificent sea with its tides, moving in continuous waves which crash and then
subside and gently wash over in the sand in foam curves.
The human form with its different structures of bone,
muscle and faculties is another intricate and marvellous mystery.
Praise you great God and loving Father, for this
magnificent creation.
A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889)
Pied
Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout
that swim;
Fresh-firecoal
chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow,
and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle
and trim.
All things counter,
original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows
how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle,
dim;
He fathers-forth
whose beauty is past change:
Praise
Him.
On my knees I thank you Father for your generous,
patterned, varied, rhythmic, exuberant and wonderfully extravagant creation.
