In awe of creation

Tuesday, our deanery had a workshop on Pope Francis’s encyclical on the care for our common home, Laudato Si’.

During the opening prayer, we were sent out in parish groups to answer a few questions and then come up with a praise of God.

The group from my parish, Dulce Nombre de María, started out very conventionally.

The first question was: “How do we meet God in our brothers and sisters?” The initial responses were fine, but conventional – in the poor, the sick. But then I mentioned kids and couples. I think we’ve been so conditioned to see God in the poor and the needy that we find it hard to see God in the ordinary people, in their joys – and not just in their sorrows.

The second question was: “What does God speak in our situation?” I can’t remember all that they shared but I urged them to move outside, where I had them listen to the breeze.

The third question was: “Where are the footprints of human beings in creation?” The negative seemed to prevail as they began to talk about the harm done to creation. I was aghast and I asked them what were the positive elements of the human presence.

I was troubled. There are severe negative effects, but why do we emphasize them and not look for the little signs of the positive that God does through us.

Also, I felt that they were trying to get me to give them the answers.

But then we got to the final task: compose an alabanza, a praise of God. The group started to go off in conventional directions but I persisted, asking a few pointed questions.

“What happened last night?” It had rained after a very hot day and after a dry spell.

“What do you hear?” There was a man chopping the grass and you could hear him working.

And so the praise emerged. I offered a few suggestions, but it came mostly from them.

Te alabamos, Señor, por este nuevo día
— por las lluvias que riega nuestros campos
— por los cantos de los pajaritos
— por las manos de los hombres y mujeres que labran el campo
— por la brisa y el sonar de las hojas de los árboles que se acarician una a otra
Alabado seas, Señor.

Here’s my free translation:

      We praise you, Lord, for this new day,

         for the rains that water our fields,

         for the songs of the birds,

         for the hands of the men and women who work the earth,

         for the breeze and the sound of the leaves of the trees

            as they caress each other.

      Lord, may you be praised.

I was awed.

Awe

After a thirteen day visit to Ames, Iowa, I am now back in Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras.

My visit was good, with many opportunities to visit with friends, talk about my ministry here, and to eat at least 13 meals with friends. (The Indian and Thai meals were memorable.)

The visit was marred a bit by the damage that had been done to St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ames, due to a fire. But I still saw many signs of life in the parish – even amidst this and other crises affecting the parish.

I left Ames on Tuesday and spent the night with Enrique who had spent about seven months living in my house while he was studying English at Iowa State about 2002. He’s now working in Des Moines and happily married with Edy, expecting a baby.

I didn’t get much sleep that night because we spent more than four hours talking. It was one of the most stimulating conversations I’ve had in a long time, much like the conversation I had with my friends Omar and Elizabeth earlier in the visit.

I got up at 3:15 am and left on a 6:20 am flight from Des Moines to Dallas, the first leg of my journey home to Honduras. Behind me was a couple with a young daughter who was experiencing her first airline flight.

I overheard her oohs and ahs as she saw the world from the airplane window. “Awesome” was a word I heard several times.

Hearing this child, I was called to see the world, once again, with awe, with wonder. God’s world is filled with wonder – but so often I forget to see it or hear it.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” wrote Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

In the midst of all the pain and conflict, I am called to see the grandeur of God in each and every person and in all that God created. Seeing this, I am called to help others see this and to live in the love that God has for all of us.

Visits to friends are important if we are open to wonder. Sometimes it takes a child in an airplane to remind us.