Day Twenty Five
Psalm 50
The Lord our God, the Mighty One, has spoken:
and summoned the earth, from the rising of the sun to its setting in the west.
2 From Zion, perfect in beauty:
God has shone out in glory:
3 Our God is coming, he will not keep silent:
before him is devouring fire, and tempest whirls about him.
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chinese say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing.Annie Dillard: Teaching a Stone to Talk Pan Books, 1984, p 69
God used to rage at the Isaelites for frequenting sacred groves. I wish I could find one. Martin Buber says: "The crisis of primitive mankind comes with the discovery of that which is fundamentally not-holy, the a-sacramental which withstands the methods and which has no 'hour', a province which steadily enlarges itself." Now we are no longer primitive; now the whole world seems not-holy. We have drained the light from the boughs in the sacred grove and snuffed it in the high places and along the banks of the sacred streams. We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. Silence is not our heritage but our destiny; we live where we want to live.