Whitewashed

O Winter,

when you bleached the color

out of every last inch of the world,

whitewashing walls and windows

to your windy heart's content,

could you not have left

a little more

within my soul?

Upon the Altar of the World

"What if God's priests, if empty-handed, might consecrate at sunrise each day is that day's development: all that the evolving world will gain and produce, and all it will lose in exhaustion and suffering.  These the priest could raise and offer.

In China again, four years later yet, [Teilhard] rode a pony north in the Mongolian grasslands and traced Quaternary strata.  Every day still he said to himself what he now called his Mass upon the altar of the world, 'To divinize the new day': 'Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forests of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world.' " 

                             - Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, 128

These words in my reading caught me, held me, compel me.
I get so caught up sometimes in my daily world that I forget about my priest-role.

It strikes me that Teilhard's words and actions are the truth, and what he represents is an act of holiness and love.
But what is a true and good and holy thing, it seems to me, is also a dangerous thing.

To give God thus all the "toil and sorrow" of each day in one's community is to open oneself to seeing the community, one's people, and their toils and cares, as God does.

This too is a holy and beautiful thing, but it is a powerful thing and heavy.  There is undoubtedly significant joy, but O what weight of sorrow is infused in people's daily lives!  To be willing to see them as God does therefore entails great suffering.

Perhaps Teilhard's exercise is a guard against excess heaviness--that in the consecration of the day he simultaneously opens himself to it and hands it over to God.  He recognizes necessarily that it is beyond the scope of his heart or his own two hands.  He must trust the wisdom and compassion of the heart of God and the sovereign control of God. 

Both acts of submission must take place or we become blind and calloused, or else worn down, heavy, and eventually cynical.  Whatever God gives us to see and hold onto in this world is never truly our own and by consecrating all that we see and do not, by opening our eyes and hearts to see the "toil and sorrow" and then offering it back to Him on the altar, we acknowledge His ultimate control.  We learn our responsibilities to what we see, and the ways He would use us to do His work.  But I must never forget that in the end, it is not my work.

In doing this, are we not becoming more like Christ? 

And as always, I have much to learn.

Words

Do we not know,
   you and I,
That we hold the power of the gods
   and not of men?
That in our words are the powers
   of all life and death—

That we speak these words
   and mostly
that rambling idle nonsense
   we think to be
     harmlessly
        in between.

And Death, too
  wears many faces.