A Tuesday Morning Sunrise


Tuesday morning (14 August 2012), while out running by Lake Hefner in Oklahoma City, this scene caught up my attention and started my imagination racing:


The first place my thoughts flew to was a scene in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person.” You would have to have read the whole story to catch the multifaceted point she was making through the peacocks, but the scene is as follows:
     “The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood, gaping.
     Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother.  ( . . . )
     The old man didn’t seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. “The Transfiguration,” he murmured. ( . . . ) The old man smiled absently. “He came to redeem us,” he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.”
O’Connor portrayed creation as involved in evangelizing, in proclaiming Christ resurrected and returning. And so my meditation turned back to the sunrise, its splendiferous beauty, its illustrative proclamation, its majestic mantle launched across the sky, and with O’Connor’s priest my heart leapt and whispered, “Christ will come like that!”

I continued my run, tearing up, and repeatedly gasping out the old liturgical prayers from 1 Corinthians 16.22c, Revelation 22.20b, and Psalm 70.1; “Come, Lord Jesus! Make haste, O God, to deliver us; make haste to help us, O LORD.”

Who would have thought that a Tuesday Morning Sunrise could have turned into a joyful moment of worship where this son of Adam and creation joined together in a symphonic conspiracy of adoration and eager longing (Romans 8.18-24a).

Mike

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