The Painted Morning Sky

"You, whose day it is, make it beautiful.

Get out your rainbow colors

so it will be beautiful."

                                 -- A Nootka morning prayer

I think this prayer could be the universal wish of humankind at morning.  Not specifically that the sky at sunrise be beautifully colored, but that the coming day be a good one (especially if yesterday went terrible).

This Nootka prayer seems to me, however, to be a prayer not merely for good fortune in the new day, but actually for a beautifully colored sunrise.  Several decades ago, when I learned some techniques of photography (before today's digital cameras), I learned how sunrises are usually softer in color, and have more pink and blue light, in contrast with the fiery reds and oranges of sunsets.  The Nootka prayer could thus be heard as a wish for a beautiful pastel-colored sky at dawn.

I would like to catch a bit of that pastel softness and harmony and take it into myself for the day.

There also seems to me to be in the Nootka prayer the suggestion that each new day carries within itself new divine promise.

Frequently when I suggest the idea that God can be known through Nature, the response I get from many people is, "But Nature can be violent!"  (I must admit I do have to bite my tongue a bit and avoid responding, "You think Nature can be violent -- did you watch the TV news last night to see what people have been doing?")

However, just as we learn how to discern the Spirit of God at work in human society, so also might we learn to discern things about God as we observe, contemplate, and learn how to interpret what Christianity often called the "book of Nature."

For example, in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus wants to point to some place where we have experienced the most demanding kind of behavior -- the challenge to"Love your enemies" -- Jesus does not turn to any saintly human beings. Instead, Jesus points to our experience of something inanimate in Nature:  the reliable sun, saying, "your Father in heaven... makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matt. 5: 44-45).  That is an example of discerning a deeper reality, God's faithfulness, in the natural rising of the sun.  Similar to the way the Nootka verse seems to rejoice with its prayer offered to God as the sun rises.

The rising of the sun is the most frequent of the reliable cycles of Nature in which we place the cycles of our own lives.

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What can noticing Nature bring to your day?