|
From Pastor/Head of Staff
Dear friends,
On this Earth Week and poetry month, I want to share with you a poem by Marie Howe. It reminds me of the hymn text by Maltbie D. Babcock that I have sung for decades – “All nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres.” It was 1901 when he penned these words that reflected the theology of his morning walks. Babcock’s hymn and Howe’s poem also invite us to consider the discovery of Pythagoras’ mathematics of harmony in ancient Greece, and Johanes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi in the 17th century.
All things in motion vibrate, and the vibrations create sound. What are the sounds you hear around you today? How does cosmic music affect the way you move the world? Not at all? A little? Not as much as you would like? May this poem be an invitation to pay attention to the music the world around us makes, whether we pay attention to it or not.
HYMN
by Marie Howe
It began as an almost inaudible hum,
low and long for the solar winds
and far dim galaxies,
a hymn growing louder, for the moon and the sun,
a song without words for the snow falling,
for snow conceiving snow
conceiving rain, the rivers rushing without shame,
the hum turning again higher — into a riff of ridges
peaks hard as consonants,
summits and praise for the rocky faults and crust and crevices
then down down to the roots and rocks and burrows
the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breaking
waves, the salt-deep: the warm bodies moving within it:
the cold deep: the deep underneath gleaming: some of us rising
as the planet turned into dawn, some lying down
as it turned into dark; as each of us rested — another woke, standing
among the cast-off cartons and automobiles;
we left the factories and stood in the parking lots,
left the subways and stood on sidewalks, in the bright offices,
in the cluttered yards, in the farmed fields,
in the mud of the shanty towns, breaking into
harmonies we’d not known possible. finding the chords as we
found our true place singing in a million
million keys the human hymn of praise for every
something else there is and ever was and will be:
the song growing louder and rising.
(Listen, I too believed it was a dream.)
With love,
Mindy
| 
