Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Claire tries cooking! Pineapple Chicken Quesadilla and Figgy Balsamic

We are the typical American family when it comes to food habits. In that, we eat a rotation of approximately the same 5 meals: - Chicken Tacos - BBQ Chicken - Sauteed Salmon - Spaghetti - "Meatloaf" Pies Every once in a blue moon, I'll add something "fun" to the mix: - Stir Fry - Pretzel Chicken - More different fish - Roast Chicken Fun meals ceased to exist once baby boy showed up, but now that he's able to sit in a high chair AND has a bit of a schedule during the day, cooking is incrementally becoming an easier task. Last night I found a slow cooker magazine (yay Better Homes and Gardens!) and realized that I'm bored with the same 5-6 meals. Trying to find new permutations of said meals is also a task I don't completely enjoy. Only Tuesdays should signal a specific food (e.g. Taco Tuesdays). So here goes a novel experiment - I'm going to try and cook something "new" once a week. Full disclosure - I'm a big fan of
Post a Comment
Read more

Book Review: Inspired by Rachel Held Evans

I was anxiously awaiting the email that arrived. The day before, via facebook, a notification had been posted to fill out a form, hit submit, and cross your fingers to receive an advanced copy of Rachel Held Evans' new book,  Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, and being a part of the book launch team. The email arrived, as did the golden ticket (aka the PDF of the advanced copy). To put this in perspective, I have been an RHE fangirl since 2012 when I first read A Year of Biblical Womanhood.  I was just out of seminary, recently married, and trying to figure out life. The humor in her writing amidst her earnest questions about what the Bible calls women to be versus what a conservative, evangelical society told women. I loved it. On top of that, my church had RHE come in 2014 and I was able to meet her (and be her chauffeur) and she was just as gracious and funny as her voice in her writing posited her to be. I never had the same affi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Syllabus for the Next 18 Months

I decided at some point in the last week that I wanted to make a checklist of 30 things to do before I turned 30. Creating a list of 30 things is harder than I imagined it would be. But, to quote Julie Andrews (which I suppose is actually quoting Rodgers & Hammerstein), "let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start." There's nothing magical about turning thirty. I imagine that on July 2, 2015, when I wake up, my eyes will still be blue, my fingers will still number ten, my instant desire will be to go back to sleep. That said, it is one of those watershed points in life. The idea of approaching thirty is both reassuring and daunting. At least I'm theoretically past the point of having a quarter-life crisis. What I want to do is be able to look back at my 20s and tell my future kids about all the adventures their parents had before they were thirty. Creating this list isn't going to create those adventures. We've already had s
7 comments
Read more