In our evening prayer service we read Psalm 103 where King David describes different aspects of the interactions of creation even small details like the springs of water and the habitation of rabbits and goats and sparrows and the order that God has established that allows for all of this.
At first it seemed strange to me that we'd regularly be prescribed this pastoral scripture, almost pagan even. But then one day I imagined David writing it as he looked around him and marveled at what he saw. Not only at creation, and not only at his place within it, but even at his ability to ponder it and that it is in fact real and beyond him.
Sometimes I think we get caught up in our minds and amidst the abstract creations of our own imagination. Our ability to even do this is amazing and unique among creatures, but we can and tend to create entire realities in our heads and can quickly begin to take objective reality for granted, dismissing it completely as an uninteresting given.
Who cares what rabbits and sparrows do when we aren't watching them? Shouldn't we be articulating and defending the intricacies of the ideology we've chosen to identify with instead? And we continue to abstract from our place on the earth into our heads to a point that we don't even regard the sun or the moon or the winds or the waters that sustain not only us but every other living thing that we also ignore, even our fellow man.
And when we do this our world becomes incredibly small, able to fit nicely within our own minds. (Which in and of itself is an incredible ability, to model a whole little world in our minds.) But we can't live there, it can't sustain us. We need to take some time to be reminded of the very big and intricate and amazingly interconnected physical existence that we live in. And as we see our place it in is both precariously similar to those irrational beasts that instinctively seek the nurturing of nature to survive and at the same time wildly and extraordinarily different from them in almost every regard evidenced plainly by our very ability to consider it.
For me Psalm 103 is a reliable source of grounding as well as a reminder of the paradoxical idea that we are both creatures and made in the image of God and that creation serves to act as a medium in which we are able to exist and commune with God.
"He sendeth forth springs in the valleys; between the mountains will the waters run. They shall give drink to all the beasts of the field; the wild asses will wait to quench their thirst. Beside them will the birds of the heaven lodge, from the midst of the rocks will they give voice. He watereth the mountains from His chambers; the earth shall be satisfied with the fruit of Thy works. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and green herb for the service of men, To bring forth bread out of the earth; and wine maketh glad the heart of man. To make his face cheerful with oil; and bread strengtheneth man's heart. The trees of the plain shall be satisfied, the cedars of Lebanon, which Thou hast planted. There will the sparrows make their nests; the house of the heron is chief among them. The high mountains are a refuge for the harts, and so is the rock for the hares. He hath made the moon for seasons; the sun knoweth his going down. Thou appointedst the darkness, and there was the night, wherein all the beasts of the forest will go abroad."
