Gifts Beyond Explanation
Photo by Anthony Gomez on Unsplash
The weather bureau can only summarize, “Wintry mix.” The poet, by contrast, bothers to delineate:
He sends the snow in winter,
the warmth to swell the grain,
the breezes, and the sunshine,
and soft refreshing rain.
(“We Plow the Fields and Scatter”).
The four lines are bracketed by
“snow in winter” and by
“soft refreshing rain.”
Here they are not a “mix” ;each is quite distinct in the storehouse of God’s good gifts..
These two terms, “snow/rain” enfold “warmth, breezes, sunshine,”
the requirements,
as every farmer and gardener knows,
for good productive growth.
All these gifts—
Snow, winter, breeze, sunshine, rain…
are objects of the verb with a personal subject.
The subject here is “He,” referring to the lordly creator.
(It might have been “she,” but we have long-running habits of speech).
The holy God (perhaps “they,” beyond all of our singular pronouns)
governs the verb “sends.”
It is God the creator who sends,
grows,
produces,
dispatches.
in a generative summons to work required of the earth.
It is the ongoing gifts of the creator that keep creation generative and flourishing;
Snow and rain from the creator God render our efforts at irrigation feeble;
such efforts add almost nothing to the prospering of the world.
All creation is referred back to the creator;
all creation receives life from God and
lives it back to God in gratitude and praise.
Beyond divine generosity, there is no explanation;
beyond divine generativity, there is no life.
We are not self-starters even when we dare imagine it so,
nor is the snow
or the rain,
or the warmth
or the sunshine.
They belong to God who gives life.
It belongs to our creatureliness to receive life gladly and gratefully;
it remains our calling to live our lives back to God,
in solidarity with all other creatures,
in obedience that is our perfect freedom,
in generosity that reflects God’s own self-giving,
in sharing that imitates the way in which God shares life with us.
What a gift!
What a giver!
What an arrangement between generativity and gratitude!
What a glad process that performs obedience and so fulfills our vocation.
Thanks be to God
for all his generative love that enwraps us on affirming solidarity! Amen.
