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Bleak and Beautiful



This past weekend seven of us ventured out of the city and into the Highlands of Scotland. Our tour guide was amazing. He's from Aberdeen and has been doing tours of the area for 25 years. Scotland is a beautiful and incredibly desolate country in the Northeast.

Aberdeen is built from the gray granite that is local to the area. This is absolutely gorgeous in the sun. The light picks out the flecks of color in the stone. The city sparkles and glows. The highlands outside of the city are vast. At this time of the year the hills are covered with a violet heather. It's a muted purple, but with the green of the grass and the changing fall colors it's quite the spectacle. Colors are more vibrant here because of the rain fall that brings forth a variety of flowers and green grass. As beautiful as north east Scotland is, it's also incredibly bleak. The sun brings out the beauty of the city's stone, but the sun is absent for most of the year. Karl (our guide) said that we are losing 3-4 minutes of daylight every day. On the shortest day of the year the sun rises at 9 am and sets at 3 pm. Soon I will be getting to work prior to sunrise and leaving after sunset.

This morning I ventured on campus early for morning prayer for the first time since arriving. The first part of the week was very gray- cold, rainy, windy. At 8 am the sun was still hidden behind the clouds, not yet up for more than an hour. We gathered in a sparsely lit chapel, hundreds of years old, to read through a liturgy almost as old.

As my readings have tended to do of late, there is a recurrent theme of a week and this week is prayer. Barth, who in Dogmatics III.4 begins by laying out that there is no universal command of God and then quickly outlines three general commands, tackles prayer as the third commanded activity- behind Sabbath and confession. Bonhoeffer, in the selection of Life Together I'm working through, writes of how important morning prayer and worship is. What strikes me from both is that the command to pray as community and the command to pray in the morning are both in-breakings. The morning interrupts the night(Bonhoeffer). Prayer, citing Barth, interrupts our lives by reminding us of our dependence on God. To pray in community in the morning breaks into our otherwise solitary, sleeping lives. It greets creation. As Genesis accounts, night becomes day at the word of God.

It's the beauty in the otherwise bleakness.

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