DAWN
December 10, 2006
In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us….
Never have I been so struck by these words … recited how many hundreds of times … the overarching structure of love, the regime of tenderness, infused into the beginning of things, the mythic beginning that has no historical starting point except this very instant … every instant can be heard the one ravishing note.
It has been said less well: I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved, the departures that begin at birth. Well, maybe. That’s the pain of loss, not annihilation, not a life of failure, of scabies and poverty absent the romantic felicity that conflates poverty with simplicity, in the assertion of the greatest poverty: to not be for the dawn from on high in tender compassion …. On earth, as it is in heaven, if only.
I recite the words in a room at dawn the color of an Hawaiian sunset, an enormous privilege, protected from the winter (When the house is sure, how good is the storm! in the phenomenology of the nest … the hut … all intimate space.) But the assertion from privilege that all space was to be so intimate and with it then the accompanying ethic: Wisdom is known by her children.
December 10, 2006
In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us….
Never have I been so struck by these words … recited how many hundreds of times … the overarching structure of love, the regime of tenderness, infused into the beginning of things, the mythic beginning that has no historical starting point except this very instant … every instant can be heard the one ravishing note.
It has been said less well: I thought / that pain meant / I was not loved. / It meant I loved, the departures that begin at birth. Well, maybe. That’s the pain of loss, not annihilation, not a life of failure, of scabies and poverty absent the romantic felicity that conflates poverty with simplicity, in the assertion of the greatest poverty: to not be for the dawn from on high in tender compassion …. On earth, as it is in heaven, if only.
I recite the words in a room at dawn the color of an Hawaiian sunset, an enormous privilege, protected from the winter (When the house is sure, how good is the storm! in the phenomenology of the nest … the hut … all intimate space.) But the assertion from privilege that all space was to be so intimate and with it then the accompanying ethic: Wisdom is known by her children.
posted by Dafath at 4:42 AM
2 Comments:
'In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us….'
I have never heard these words
..ignoramus me..
but this morning's dawn should have make me think them
and that one ravishing note
I, like you, adore that sound
thanks anna
is from a canticle entitled
benedictus dominus deus
Luke 1:68-79
recited every Wedsneday morning of the year and some other times
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