Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

Where the wild ones are

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

From Psalm 25
Make known to me your ways, O Lord, and teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my savior, and my hope is in you all day long.

Mary Oliver writes prose like she writes poetry. The good, the true and the beautiful drip onto her words, and I am glad to sit here and soak it all in. At age 74, she writes of aging in her essay "Winter Hours."

"I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world ... what I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude. Such interest nourishes me beyond the finest compendium of facts. In my mind now, in any comparison of demonstrated truths and unproven but vivid intuitions, the truths lose."

Mary knows, as she says elsewhere, that fires which warm us, also scorch us. Searching for truth takes us inside ourselves, but then we're sent back out. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. What is truth?

There is nothing more valuable. But "knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves." Knowledge need not be all there is to truth.

I have been taught to pray, and I love to pray, and I think God loves it when I pray. It's all good. I am so thankful to ask God every day to guide me into his truth. My hope is in my Father all day long.

Here is a poem Mary wrote in 1992, when she was just my age (67). The poem is about prayer, about living ... about God, of course. What poem is not about God?

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Mary writes out the poems that are given her. She walks in the woods. One summer she built a house. As she grows older she is "more interested in the tricks of the mind, and gaining, also, a new affection for wood that is useless, that has been tossed out, that merely exists, quietly, where it ends up."

Establish the work of our hands, Lord. We take thousands of breaths in our lifetime. Our heart beats and beats and beats, hundreds of thousands of beats and then one day, it just stops. We need not be afraid. Your rod and your staff, they comfort us, and we will dwell, in the house of the Lord, forever.

Devotions Archive

Where the wild ones are

Tuesday, March 21, 2017