“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Who is coming to judge the living and the dead, have mercy upon us sinners, forgive our sinful falls throughout our lives, and by ways known to Thee alone, hide us from the face of antichrist within the secret desert of Thy salvation.”
“Your birds awaken me in the morning, and the murmur of the lake lulls me to sleep in the evening. But it is not the birds that awaken me, nor the lake that lulls me to sleep, but You, O Lord, Master of the voice.
“You lend Your voice to the birds and the midnight murmur to the lake. You have lent a voice to every throat, and have put a story into every creature. I am surrounded by Your heralds, as a student by many teachers, and I listen to them tirelessly from dawn to dusk.
“O Lord, Master of the voice, speak more clearly through your heralds!
“The sun speaks to me about the radiance of Your countenance, and the stars about the harmony of Your being. The sun speaks in one language, and the stars speak in a different language, but all the languages flow out of the same vocal cords. The vocal cords belong to You, and You uttered the first sound that began to tremble in the deafness and formlessness of nothingness, and it broke into countless sounds and heralds, as a thundercloud breaks into rain drops….”
-St. Nikolai Velimirovich, from XXVII, Prayers by the Lake
I am pondering St. Nikolai’s plea, that the Lord speak more clearly… If we can’t understand, isn’t the problem that we are hard of hearing? But maybe it is his way of saying, “I am straining the ears of my heart, Lord, to know You better.”
When I found this particular prayer yesterday, it resonated with my own experience here in the mountains, where so much of my attention is focused on the birds, the clouds, and yes, the stars. After a thunderstorm one evening, I went out and found the sky full of them, declaring the glory of God, in their voices that are deep silence.
One afternoon when I sat on the deck reading, the silence caught my attention. At home in the suburbs, I have learned not to pay attention to all the neighborhood noises, and the freeway sounds that come on the wind from a mile away. Some hours are quieter than others, but if I listen closely, there is always the ticking of a clock, or the cars in the street. When I noticed that forest silence that my ears are not used to, I concentrated hard, to discover what might be in it. And all that I could take in was the pine boughs moving in the breeze.
This poem from St. Nikolai’s collection is not really about the voice of God in silence. He goes on past what I quoted to talk about words and stories. It has truly been lovely for me to be slowed down by having fewer matters to attend to; to tune in to the “stories,” as it were, in the activities of the animals here, and to study a few plants. I saw another new-to-me plant not far from lakeside, called an American Parsley Fern:
I could watch the animals all day, I think, from my first-rate viewing perch. Chickadees are plentiful, and a junco made an appearance. I’m thankful that my sister suggested that I bring up some food that the chipmunks would like. This morning two chipmunks came to the slider and ran up and down, peering in with their paws against the glass. Do they know that the seeds come from the other side?
What I have been putting out for them is a mix of seeds and peanuts, and now a gang of Steller’s Jays have come for a share. As many as four at a time were interested.
They are truly handsome birds, with their shiny royal blue feathers. Of course they are greedy, and don’t have pretty voices, but they belong to this place, as it belongs to them. I’m happy that our stories overlapped for a short time, and wouldn’t mind if they did wake me in the mornings — but when I wake everything is still very quiet, and the sky that’s visible between the trees outside my window is turning from gray to pale blue.
Toil is man’s allotment;
toil of brain, or toil of hands,
or a grief that’s more than either,
the grief and sin of idleness.
-Herman Melville
In addition to that pithy quote, I found an old blog post of mine on the topic of work, in which my stories illustrate to some degree what I think Chesterton was saying, quoted in this post last week. It’s almost ten years old: “Art and happiness flow from love and work.” It was a good reminder to me of things that haven’t changed.
Let me amend Melville’s statement, too, because the categories he mentions don’t seem to include a place for prayer, which is also work, of the most essential sort. We pray from our hearts, or our spirit, with the help of our bodies.
I wish you all the joy of good work, strengthening prayer, and satisfied rest. ❤
A LIST OF PRAISES
Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.
Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences.
Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.
Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over.
Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.
Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river,
Wilderness river.
Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities,
Far even from the towns,
With piercing innocence
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes
And four notes only.
Give praise with water,
With storms of rain and thunder
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar
That fills the seaside villages,
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains
And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.
-Anne Porter
Gladsome Lights 