Waiting for Easter (like a Good Ol' Georgia Pine)

Today is a day of waiting, and often waiting for anything, perhaps much more so for Easter, can be a wearisome business. Most likely you, like me, will spend this day of waiting by getting ready, not only for your parish's Holy Saturday Easter Vigil or Easter morning worship, but also for preparing Sunday's dinner, for visiting friends, or for sharing your lives with the world's poor.

When waiting is a big part of my life, I often like to read quietly (out under trees if possible), and in this morning's earliest light, while reading Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, this came to me:

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It ‘consents’ so to speak, to God’s creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree…. This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do. Therefore each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what God wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by God’s Love and God’s infinite Art.

As I wait (and later vacuum the house and help June get ready for the family to visit tomorrow), I'll give glory to God this Holy Saturday by simply being Andy. That should be easy enough, just like the trees over my head are now simply being trees.

Image: Ol' Georgia Pines Rising Above Me as I Read by Andy