Morning Prayer :: The morning after five years

This morning, a newly minted five year old snuggles in for a cuddle on the front porch swing, while the first green of spring bursts out on the trees. "The same old world, but new."* And every breath she takes against my body, every glint of light upon the river, every birdsong carol, all are morning prayers rising from the fresh dawn to the Father of creation.

Here is perfection, often glimpsed yet rarely grasped, and it lives and breathes in my arms.
Here is beauty so pure, and who am I to behold it, and how can a windswept hill make me want to cry for joy and longing?
Here is wonder in the warmth of a freckled face, and the curious nature of seeds, and this one child that I have woken to each morning for five years.

Here is life, life more abundantly.

It is right to give our thanks and praise!

* From Come and See: A Christmas Story by Monica Mayper

~lg

Reading list thus far

I realized the other day I hadn't yet written down any of the books I've read this year. I thought back to my bedside stacks, and this is what I came up with.

Farewell to the East End (Jennifer Worth)

The Geography of Nowhere (James Howard Kunstler)

Longbourn (Jo Baker)

Little House in the Big Woods (Laura Ingalls Wilder) - Read aloud with Arden

Pilgrim’s Inn (Elizabeth Goudge)

The Bird in the Tree (Elizabeth Goudge)

The Heart of the Family (Elizabeth Goudge)

On Hope (Josef Pieper)

The Gospel of the Kingdom (George Eldon Ladd)

Timeless Simplicity: Creative Living in a Consumer Society (John Lane) 

It's been a long, stormy winter, which has been a definite benefit for the book list! Things may slow down as spring picks up. 

On the "To Read" list for the rest of the year:

Emma (Jane Austen)

Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis) - it's been a few years since I've read this one

Revelation (Joseph Mangina) - a few chapters left

More Elizabeth Goudge

~lg 

~lg

Fools of Spring

May Day, and the bells ring out in distant Oxford, and the grass grows green on the sunny side of the house, and the blackbirds make a racket in the bracken, and we are shouting the same glad song for winter’s death with each stomp of our rubber boots.

Spring turns us all into yabbering fools, sprouting sincere, if unoriginal, poetry. And why not? Spring awakens our childlikeness. No one has ever said of a child’s first stab at a cat or the sun or their father, “Not bad, but I think it’s been done before.”

We are children, delighting in life and trying to get at its very essence, and all we have are shadow words next to its glory. Yet that should not, must not, stop us, for part of the glory we share is this urge of reproduction, the desire to create, and in creating to somehow comprehend our own origins in the freshness deep down.

Spring is not notable for its originality, but for its origin. God makes the spring come to Oxford and our island alike, this I tell my son. Woven into the patterns of the earth, spun up in its turning, spring is the recurring invitation to become the child we were born to be. 

~lg