I don’t know if any of
the rest of you had this experience this morning, but as I was driving along a
tree-lined street, I looked at the bare tree branches each with their little
white overline of snow, and stopped and thought, “Wow; isn’t this beautiful.” I
remember one time in seminary, one Spring, walking round the lakes at Notre
Dame and stopping by one of the trees outside Moreau seminary that was in full
pink bloom. One of our priests was also stopped by it, looking at it, and
commented (to God, but possibly conscious of my overhearing), “You didn’t have
to give us this too.”
Early on in
my formation with Holy Cross, I was sitting in on a junior high science class
in a Catholic school in one of our parishes. The lesson was introducing
students to the functional anatomy of a flower. I’d never had the blessing of
Catholic education growing up, and so I remarked to myself during this lesson,
that it was identical to the lesson I probably received on this in my secular
education, except for about six seconds. Seemingly spontaneously, the teacher stopped
at one moment and remarked about the flower in her hand: “Isn’t this beautiful?
How gracious is our God to have given us this!” The second half, naming God as
the giver, of course couldn’t have been said in a secular setting. The first
half, though, (“Isn’t this beautiful?”) completely could, but I don’t ever
remember it. I have many excellent memories of my secondary school biology
teacher, but I don’t ever remember her using class time to stop and marvel at
beauty, or to encourage us to.
Marveling
at the beauty of the created world, and recognizing God as Creator are
technically independent things; one can do one without the other (and I can
think of people who do do each one of these without the other). But, while they
may be independent in some technical sense, they should mutually build one
another up. I don’t think there’s a specific order we have to engage these
things in. We might start by being moved by the beauty of creation, and then
decide to open our Bibles to the first page, and read about God’s creating
word, and God’s marveling recognition of creation’s fundamental goodness. Or we
might start with the Bible reading, and then that leads us to go out and marvel
ourselves.
In Laudato
Si’, the Pope’s encyclical on the environment, he notes how we need careful
scientific study of the natural world and the environment, a kind of
technological attentiveness, but we also an awareness that can only come from
divine revelation of God’s creative action and recognition of created goodness.
Only those two things together, attentiveness to the world, and awareness of
God’s action, can lead to marveling and wonder, which are goods in and of
themselves, creating joy, but are also really the only things that can lead us
to reform our behavior, to shift to behaviors that will form an earth more hospitable
to future generations.
The magi
provide a model of how attentiveness to the world and to divine revelation lead
to joy. Their journey starts with their pain-staking observation of the movements
of the stars. They make records, perform calculations, notice the slightest
deviation from the expected. There was a sense among many Jewish authors at
this time that astrology was the least bad form of pagan religion. People who
thought that animals or statues carved by a human were gods were just laughable,
but those who spent all their time watching the stars were at least fascinated
by something genuinely majestic.
These magi’s
paying attention to the world leads them to start their journey. But it doesn’t
get them to the end. It may be that they don’t realize this right away. They
show up in Jerusalem, and ask to see the newborn king, asking the old king
where he is. But, Herod, for all his flaws, knows the necessity of divine revelation.
He knows that when you have a question you can’t answer, one good way forward
is to get your scribes to look up some scripture for you (we can just get our
phones to do the same thing for us now).
There would
have been no question without that careful attentiveness to the world, there
would have been no answer without divine revelation. But together, the magi
make it to their destination. They make it to the place where they can lay down
their gifts. They make it to the place where they can worship, honor, and
adore.
Matthew
tells us that they were overjoyed on that final leg of their journey, but there’s
another joy here unnamed. In our first reading from Isaiah, we read about the
joy Jerusalem will experience when all the nations flock to it to offer their gifts.
We don’t really know how over-joyed baby Jesus would have been at gold,
frankincense and myrrh (though gold, at least, is shiny, and babies tend to
like shiny things), but God, God would have been over-joyed at seeing people
respond positively to His offer of self in His son, in the Incarnation. I don’t
know if we think about God’s joy much, but it’s contagious, and more so when we
recognize it.
For us, our
attentiveness both to the world around us and to divine revelation (in scripture
and tradition) can bounce off each other, and build each other up. Sometimes
one will give a question, and the other an answer. Hopefully, together, they’ll
lead us on a journey, a journey characterized by marveling, that leads to us
seeing where to lay down our gifts, to worship, honor, and adore, and know God’s
joy.
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