Bowing Continuously
“Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker.” Psalm 95:6
As most of you know, I am a big fan of Mary Oliver’s poetry. In Oliver’s newest book, Blue Horses, there is a poem called “Forgive Me.” It reads: “Angels are wonderful but they are so, well, aloof. It’s what I sense in the mud and the roots of the trees, or the well, or the barn, or the rock with its citron map of lichen that halts my feet and makes my eyes flare, feeling the presence of some spirit, some small god, who abides there. If I were a perfect person, I would be bowing continuously. I’m not, though I pause wherever I feel this holiness, which is why I’m often so late coming back from wherever I went. Forgive me.”
In this poem I sense a call to pay more attention to God’s presence in our everyday surroundings. I also see here a word of caution. If we are not careful we will spend too much time seeking God in lofty matters we cannot really understand, like angels, and thereby miss revelations of the divine in the more common things we can comprehend. Finding God through the Creation is a theme that runs through many of Oliver’s poems. She seems to discover God in places most of us wouldn’t even think to look—mud, roots, rocks, lichen. I have often wished I could see the world through Mary Oliver’s eyes.
Oliver sees God in so many places that she says if she were a perfect person she would constantly be bowing. Bowing, of course, is the proper thing to do when one encounters God. The One who made this world and who can be found within it deserves our worship and praise and would receive it continuously if we were actually able to see the evidence of the divine in everything around us.
Oliver indicates this would happen in her own life if she were perfect but is quick to note that she is not. She, too, misses a lot of God’s manifestations but she is at least wise enough to pause and bow whenever she does sense God’s presence in her surroundings. She is also wise enough to realize that if pausing to bow and worship the Creator makes one late for something it is still the right thing to do. In the end there is nothing more important to do and no better way to spend one’s time.
There is an old hymn called “Open My Eyes That I May See.” It lists a number of things the writer/singer would like to see. Today it is my prayer that God will open your eyes and mine to see the divine in the common ordinary things of life, and especially in the world of nature. It is also my prayer that as this request is granted we will actually take the time to bow and worship the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth.
–Chuck
(I took the top image at the Bristlecone Pine Forest in California, the middle image in Henderson County, KY, and the bottom image at Garden of the Gods in southern Illinois.)