Seeing With New Eyes
“What should I write my blog about this week?” I asked Mary, my married partner for over 47 years.
Without hesitation, she said, “Write about how the beautiful weather speaks of the Presence of God. Talk about how we can find God in the beauty of the past few days’ weather.”
Mary’s wonderful way of seeing today’s weather—sunny, clear and filled with a gentle, though cool, breeze—reminded me of the yoga tradition’s belief about creation and the environment and triggered in my mind a song from St. Francis of Assisi:
The heavens are telling the glory of God, And all creation is shouting for joy! Come dance in the forest! Come play in the fields! And sing! Sing to the glory of the Lord!
It continues on—praising the sun and the moon, our brother and sister. It praises the wind and the rain, also related to us. It is a song of unity, of oneness.
That relationship of unity is the same for the Yoga Tradition. Whenever we see the sun brighten the landscape, if we have the eyes to see, we are reminded that the Lord of Life and the Creator of Growth is present. Whenever the wind and the rain caress the earth, new life sprouts, especially at this time of the year when most gardens are planted. The activity of the divine continually fills all life (and that means humans as well) with health and expansion, with nourishment and support.
St. Francis and yoga ask us to have the eyes to see the activity of the Divine within nature. Yoga and Christianity at its core ask us to see the Divine Love of God as integrated with all life. Then the sun, the moon, the stars, the rain, the wind, the plants, and the animals, that is, all life, will not just be tools for food production, or opportunities for some company to sell sunscreen, or issues of concern in the climate change debate.
All of creation will be the catalyst for our closer union with God, our closer realization that God is with us all the time, healing and loving us, nourishing and supporting us, refreshing and pushing us to greater life. We will realize that our blood vessels and hemoglobin are expanded by the divine’s generosity of the sun’s Vitamin D. We will realize that we are being made powerful and strong because of God’s presence in the sun, or in God’s cleansing wind and rain because the Divine “speaks to” us constantly in nature.
We will truly begin to know the external and internal reality of the Divine in our lives because we see with new eyes.
Amen! Alleluia!
Namaste’