This is the day the Lord has made. Although I have read almost none of the Bible, these words often come spontaneously when I first step outside and greet the morning.
I wonder: did we make up the idea of God so joy would have a receptacle? The awe in the presence of what’s here: what else to do with it but to ascribe it to an almighty generative force? What else to do with the rush of gratitude, on rising each morning, upon stepping out onto the porch and discovering that the blessed thing is still happening: the trees have stood all night, holding animals in their arms. The earth has held the trees’ feet as I’ve slept.
Each moment the stillness is its vivid self, both ordinary and miraculous. How can I not say thank you?
Glory be to God for dappled things, said a poet priest, so in love with the physical world that he worried it made him profane.
I don’t know if there is a god, but I want there to be. What else am I to do with what animates me, the surge up my bones on greeting the new day? How am I to possibly contain the tenderness of the thing I rest in when I lie down in the dark? Each moment the stillness is its vivid self, both ordinary and miraculous. How can I not say thank you?
And is there a something, a someone, to receive my thanks? Is the urge to bow the head simply the recognition of how far forever goes, of how much is unknown, and unknowable? The recognition of the smallness of one human being, and the mystery that attends everything — that attends, so gently, every single thing?
This is the day the Lord has made. Here it is, this moment: here it is, as it is. This is it! I am privileged to be here for it. The content of the moment is utterly irrelevant. We don’t get to pick and choose the moment the Lord has made. We can piss and moan, or we can rejoice: that we didn’t miss it. We were here for it, really here, for every scrap of it.
Rejoice and be glad.