Praise Ye The Lord … for the Miracles of Our Senses

Only through our senses do we come to know the creatures God has created. These creatures are as so many mirrors giving us faint reflections of His beauty and love.

Our minds cannot reach out at present and grasp God in the fullness of His splendor. Though God is not visible to us now, He tells us about Himself in love letters.

The love letter God sends us is printed in flaming stars high overhead so that all who see may read. It is inscribed in the fragile beauty of the orchid, emblazoned in the scarlet glory of sunset, and sculptured in granite upthrusts of mountains rising like an arrow to the sky.

Quiet beaver ponds ringed round with solemn spruce, myriads of stars beating with hearts of fire, white and topaz and misty red, the wind whispering its secrets to the tree tops all these are sacramental things to teach the souls of men.

From the majestic heights of the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona to the smiling pansy in your flower box, there is wonder and mystery. Every moment of our life we dwell in God's wonder world. If we see not the magic, the fault must be our own. “To me,” said Walt Whitman, “every hour of light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.” Contemplating the vast scintillating depths of the midnight sky arched over and around him, Abraham Lincoln said, "I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens, and say there is no God."

Albert Einstein described how beauty can lead to God. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed."

"This insight into the mystery of life has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is the center of true religiousness."

Bernard Basset informs us that some great men were able to retain their vision of God because they preserved their sense of wonder throughout their lives. Thus, Francis of Assisi came close to God through animals and nature; Thomas More found God in the colors of a peacock feather. Teresa of Avila was absorbed in silk worms, Francis de Sales with bees. Augustine saw the approach of God through girls and light and food and flowers and the sun.

The bulk of far-flung continents, the pressureheavy depths of the ocean, the everlasting harmony of the twinkling stars, the great winds waltzing down from the regions of Chaos and Immensity; the pounding roar of the surf on granite boulders as the great sea smacks his foaming lips; all these tell us of Him who holds the ocean in the palm of his hand, who made the stars and calls them all by name.

The more perfect and beautiful the organization of living creatures, the more they show forth the love and skill of their Creator. The more they imitate His uncreated perfection.

Nowhere in the world are there deserts like those in Arizona, for nowhere else in the world are there the native saguaro and other forms of life pertinent to this ecosystem.

A giant redwood rising like a monarch on a mountain side spreads its huge branches to contest the passage of the clouds. It wrestles with Herculean winds in storm locked nights. It rests in the mellow glow of moonlight on a midsummer's night. It is a love letter from God in red and green to tell us: "Only God can make a tree."

When the forests are a mist of green-gold leaves, and the meadows embroidered with daisies like bright stars fallen from the sky, we love to walk in the deep, moist woods and through the open places radiant with clusters of flowers. So intricate in design, and lovely in pattern are they, they seem to belong to the scented blossom banks of heaven. We rejoice in the unspoiled beauty of flowers. They are symbols of beauty, and innocence, honor and glory. They make music out of color, and sing to us of the beauty and lovableness of God. If there are sermons in stones, and books in babbling brooks, there are odes and elegies in flowers.

The world is all yours that it may lead you to Love Itself. Therefore review the vastness of creation so that your heart may expand with God. Let your mind be a mansion for all lovely forms so that heaven may flow in upon your soul in many dreams of high desire. As the great world spins forever down the ringing grooves of change, its unceasing thunder and eternal waves speak to you of Him who lights the stars in the heavens, and opens the blossom of the hawthorn. Long fields of barley and of rye that clothe the world and meet the sky tell you of Him who listens to our prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread." When we look at the wonders that crowd around us on every side, we will do well to recall the words of Michael Faraday, credited with being the greatest experimental scientist who ever lived. It was Michael Faraday who induced the first electric current, developed the first dynamo, and created the science of electrochemistry and with it a primary implement of modern industry.

The Voiceless Flower Speaks eloquently of the love of God.

Faraday looked upon his pursuit of science as essentially a search for God. “These,” he once said of the physical laws, “are the glimmerings we have of the second causes by which the one Great Cause works his wonders and governs the earth.” Each day we live in a world throbbing with romance, adventure, -mystery, and fascination. All we need do is open the windows of our mind, and we shall perceive with Gerard Manely Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Dr. Wernher von Braun, America's great rocket expert, and the “Father of the Saturn” rocket that took our astronauts to the moon, says, “The better we understand the intricacies of the atomic structure, the nature of life, or the master plan for the galaxies, the more reason we have found to marvel at God's creation.” Teilhard de Chardin, one of the most noted scientists of this century, tells us that our task is to perceive God hidden in the heart of the universe. In words vibrating with enthusiasm and joy, Chardin goes on to say, “Lord, it is you who, through the imperceptible goadings of sense-beauty, penetrated my heart in order to make its life flow out into yourself.

The Valley of the Little Colorado.

"You came down into me by means of a tiny scrap of created reality; and then, suddenly, you unfurled your immensity before my eyes and displayed yourself to me.

"In the life springing up within me, in the material elements that sustain me, it is not just your gifts that I discern; it is you, yourself that I encounter, you who cause me to share in your own being, and whose hands mould me.

"Every presence," continues Chardin, "makes me feel that you are near me; every touch is the touch of your hand.

"God is, in a sense, at the point of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my needle - and my heart and my thought.

St. Augustine in his Confessions asks: "But what is it that I love when I love You, my God?

"Not the beauty of any bodily thing, nor the order of the seasons, nor the brightness of the light that rejoices the eye, nor the sweet melodies of all songs, nor the sweet fragrance of flowers and ointments and spices; nor bread nor honey. None of these things do I love in loving my God. Yet, in a sense, I do love light, and melody, and fragrance and food and embrace when I love my God.

"And what is this God?' I asked the earth and it answered: 'I am not He'; and all things that are in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deep and the creeping things, and they answered: 'We are not your God; seek higher.' "I asked the winds that blow, and the whole air with all that is in it answered: 'I am not God.' I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they answered: 'Neither are we God whom you seek.' "And I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: 'Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.' "And they cried out in a great voice: 'He made us.

"My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty.

Astronaut James Lovell gives us this fascinating story of the Apollo 8 flight around the moon. "Just before this flight, I received a letter from my high school English teacher, Miss Clarke.

"She sent me some lines from a poem written by a Canadian aviator in World War II. I thought about those lines, they were with me through the entire flight. I guess they say what I wish I were articulate enough to say about my experience up there: 'I've trod the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and felt the face of God'."

DIOS PASO POR AQUI*

It is written in The First Book of Moses, called Genesis: "... And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And the Evening and the morning were the sixth day." "... On the seventh day God rested from all His work that He had made."

It is not generally known except to a few mortals with a spark of cosmic imagination that, according to the keeper of apocryphal legends in the Great Hall of Dreams, God came to earth for a closer look at everything He had made and said to Himself, "It is all too very good, but it lacks something. A few million years from now it will all look too man-made perfect."

The mountains were majestic and freshly magnificent with many of the peaks especially created to appear as though they reached heaven. Nevertheless, a mountain was a mountain was a mountain.... And so with the oceans and the shores, the deserts and the lakes and the rivers . . . and, of course, man.

The more He thought upon things, the more He thought that the world looked as though man had been here before.

Somehow, somewhere, in some unique, unchallengeable way, God had to leave a mark that He was the first and the only Creator.

God had purposely made no two things exactly alike, and no thing was intended to be perfect - least of all man. When He created man, He thought into forever and devised the perfect program for perpetual creation and perpetual attrition.

"... Be fruitful," He said, "and multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it...." (Genesis I:28).

He created man in His image and, to various degrees of near perfection, so wonderful that He foresaw the possibility that some day in the millenniums to come many men would come along, each in his way, saying, "I am God... I am the way... I created the world, and I can destroy the world."

God was proud of His Creation and He just didn't want to be caught napping with one eye open and the other shut on the side where some fool was working at destroying His masterpiece, which was still unsigned due to the fast pace of the six-day miracle.

The Lord had been Earthbound since dawn. It was almost high noon when He crossed mid-continent over what is now known as the Mississippi River. He made one easy hop over the Western Mountains and suddenly realized He was in the middle of a big, wide open space where a mere man could look and not see anything for a week in any direction.

"Hmm," He thought, holding His chin in His hand. "There must have been some reason for My forgetting this part of Earth."

Suddenly a great thirst came upon the Lord. He raised Himself to His full height and far to the northeast saw a silver sliver of a river, flow-ing westward.

He could have tipped the planet to hasten the flow of the river, but it was much too soon to disturb the balance of a newly created ecosys-tem. He could have gone to the river in one easy hop but something about the big, wide-open-space place He had forgotten held Him there as if by a magnet.

In one impulsive movement of frustrating indecision He stomped one foot hard into the ground. Suddenly the planet trembled, the earth cleaved at His feet; and lo! the river had come to Him. He threw Himself flat on the ground, cooled His face in the happy water, and drank of its precious liquid.