It is the middle of May, and spring is almost in full blossom. Only a couple of short weeks ago, the tree branches were bare against the mostly gray, sometimes blue skies of late winter and early spring. Now those same branches bear great, heavy crowns of new green leaves, and wild flowers cover the fields and yards with rich, vibrant, kaleidoscopic colors. The morning air is filled with the lovely, melodious bird songs of every kind. The dullness of winter is soon forgotten, and our own spirits seem lighter with all of this seemingly sudden and magnanimous appearance of beauty.
When the psalmist wrote the psalm that has come down to us as Psalm 148, it seems that his heart and mind must have been surprised by joy, much like ours are at the glorious birth of spring each year. Are we not sometimes overwhelmed by the sudden recognition of pure beauty? Maybe it is a sunrise or a sunset that awakens within us with an epiphany so full of pure wonder that it is beyond our capacity to speak of it. When we try to explain that inner experience of beauty to another, we find our words, indeed, the full richness of our language, are not sufficient to articulate it with the same depth and awe that we so personally experienced it.
And why not? Such moments of grace are utterly and uniquely personal. When we experience them, we are moved to the depths of our being. They are pure, unasked-for gifts from God, giving us a brief, heavenly moment…for free. In those moments, are we not awed and humbled at being in the presence of that which is greater than ourselves? Those moments are, in fact, very personal gifts of grace from the Creator to us, his beloved children. In reality, all of God’s Creation sings God’s praise in every moment simply by being fully what God intended it to be.
Is this not what the psalmist is revealing in his words, “Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise him in the heights. Praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his host. Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, shining stars. Praise him, highest heavens. Let them praise the name of the Lord. He commanded: they were made. He fixed them forever, gave a law which shall not pass away” (Ps. 148:1-6)? Is this same wisdom not opened up to us at the beginning of Psalm 19 with these words: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech, night after night, they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them, yet their voice goes out into all the world” (vs. 1-4)?
When I came to recognize this reality, it gave me an entirely new and deeper understanding of the words of the Spirit written by the Apostle Luke: “In him we live and move and have our being, for we too are his offspring” (Acts 17:28). This beauty speaks to us in the depths of our hearts and minds. In these sudden, surprising gifts of beauty, God is revealing his love for his Creation to us; he is giving us a hint of the beauty he sees in each one of us. He is giving us a tiny glimpse of heaven at a level that we can, in our finiteness, handle. I don’t know about you, but when those moments happen to me, I feel that my heart could explode for joy. I feel overwhelmed, as if my body cannot contain what my spirit is made for and yearns for…not yet!
I see this same, unbidden, explosive joy at the sudden recognition of God in his Creation in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, Pied Beauty: “Glory be to God for dappled things–for skies of couple-color as a brinded cow; for rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim…He fathers forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.” Suffice it to say, beauty is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. Each of those precious, brief moments when I am suddenly and overwhelmingly surprised by such joy, I have come to recognize it as a God moment, a personal invitation to be still, to be present to Him who created the sun, the moon, the stars…and me. Praise Him!
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