Inspiration:
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins
Abundant Life
It can be easy to lose track of the simple abundances of life if we are hungry, or unsheltered, or in want of something as simple as mittens in the raw Minnesota winter. Abundance has this dimension—that it is responsive to need. There is a Sufi teaching story that explores the nature of abundance. It tells of a seeker who was meditating in the forest and observed a bear with a mangled foreleg. Unable to run or to hunt, the bear seemed destined to die of starvation, yet as the seeker watched, a fox came with its prey of that day, and after eating its fill, it left the remainder of the meal for the bear. Several days the seeker observed this same pattern, saying to himself, “Behold, how good and generous is God, who feeds the bear by means of the fox, how He provides for all His creatures! I, too, will put my trust in Him utterly.” And the seeker retired to a cave, to await the arrival of his provision, but days passed and nothing came. Finally, on the fifth day, as he was fainting from hunger, a voice said to him, “O thou who art in the path of error, repent! Stop imitating the injured bear, and go out and follow the example of the fox!”
by Kendyl Gibbons, Senior Minister, First Unitarian Society, Minneapolis, Minnesota TO READ MORE
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