A Vastness Come Near
As a child, I was awed by the night sky. The stars were mere pin holes, to my eyes, but also drilled, glittering specks of light. When I could see them through our Southern California smog and suburban light pollution the glories of dim expanses and glimmering lights quieted my childlike antsiness.
But the stars also stirred something in me. I don’t know how much I connected that sky to a Creator God, but what I saw was gloriously more than simply vast. I was glimpsing also an immensity that attracted me, making me at least vaguely aware of a Something far larger than I. Even a Someone.
I don’t recall that what took place in me was exactly praise and prayer, but at least an awakening to wonder. To an awareness of a quiet, radiating splendor.
*
A book saved from childhood has accompanied me through well more than a dozen moves, and fed my glistening sense of overarching wonders. My older brother, in a child’s hand, scribbled his name on the inside front cover, so it’s clearly a hand-me-down. But the book became mine, in more ways than one.
Prayers for Children, “A Little Golden Book,” was studded with watercolor scenes of cherubic children with a warm soft-focus to the illustrations—scenes of rural idyllic calm and home-like comforts and yes, even a closing spread with a lit-up night sky. All these decades later, something in me quiets when I open it up. Did what I see and read connect in me the limitlessness of the universe to a dawning longing within me?
“Dear Father, Hear and Bless,” the first prayer is titled.
Intertwining with the stanza a tousle-headed boy holds a fuzzy baby robin with a nest just by, a momma bird a few inches up the branch, feeding a plump, curled caterpillar to another baby bird, already out of the nest, its wings but stubs, but still with a little beak craned wide open to receive.
So much is right about the picture, and I see connections now that would have surely been only subtle or subconscious then: the linking of a kind creator with the beauties of nature, for instance. But more, I would have lingered over the scene of birth and life and the presence of fledgling creatures not many days away from fleeing the nest.
And the prayer itself, read to me, later read by me, introduced God into the pages, pointing to a vaster tenderness behind the snug scene.
Dear Father,
hear and bless
Thy beasts
and singing birds;
And guard
with tenderness
Small things
that have no words.
*
Dear Father, the prayer began, I notice now. Might that little word before the Heavenly Father’s name have left an impression? I think children are more attuned to such realities than we may think, coming out as they do with minor profundities before they can read and write. I wonder if I sensed the gentle pointers to divine relationality, even without the vocabulary to sort through it.
We persons are made, as Genesis famously says, in the image of God. That must mean we reflect the divine intelligence, his will and creativity. But even more, because we have been created, we by some daily miracle transcend the universe’s dark sky hollowness; we find awakened within us a sense of God’s relational nearness. That is part of our sharing the divine image.
So God—a named being—seemed to enjoy flinging extravagances of space and nebulae and vast warming suns, but not just for sport, but for the possibilities of relating. The majestic creativity of a vast God does not preclude his appearing also as a showering, personalized kindness. For “before the universe is even mentioned,” Michael Lloyd writes in Café Theology about the world’s origin story of Genesis, “the Bible has already introduced us to a Person.” One who is not only infinite but One from whom a child might feel the invitation to address as Dear.
How does creation harken your heart to the divine?
TELL US IN THE COMMENTS.
TIMOTHY JONES is a Visiting Scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. He has been a pastor of Episcopal congregations small and large. He was an associate editor at Christianity Today and special projects editor for Upper Room Books. He’s also over the years been active in authoring books, with publishers ranging from evangelical Protestant (Thomas Nelson, Tyndale) to New York secular (Ballantine, Doubleday). The burden of his books has concerned prayer and practices of a growing spiritual life, with a special calling to make the difficult and daunting in prayer seem inviting and possible in daily ways. More recently he's written for Ekstasis magazine, Fathom magazine, and The Christian Century. He blogs at revtimothyjones.com and is working now on a semi-memoirish exploration of the doctrine of the Trinity, from which some of these thoughts were excerpted.