The First Bible
This devotional from Richard Rohr hit home. For the last two months my wife and I have had the pleasure of staying at my Sister’s cabin on weekends on a small lake near Bellingham, WA. We just sold our house in the burbs and we hardly ever sat outside because we lived on a busy street with lots of street lights that made seeing the stars next to impossible. One of our favorite things to do at the cabin is to bundle up, grab blankets, and sit on the back deck and watch the stars. We sit there, sometimes for hours “in awe.”
By Richard Rohr
Nature was a mirror of the soul for St. Francis of Assisi—a mirror for himself and a mirror for God. All this mirroring effected a complete change of consciousness, a shift in how he saw reality.
When Francis was a young man, he loved to party. One night he left the party and looked up at the stars above Assisi. He stood there for a long time, in awe of what he saw. He said, “If these are the creatures, what must the Creator be like?”
The outer world began to name the inner experience and the nature of God for Francis. It all became a two-way mirror through which he could see God and also see his deepest soul. Our Franciscan tradition has always seen creation as “the first Bible,” which had a 14.5-billion-year lead on the written Bible.
From In the Footsteps of Francis: Awakening to Creation webcast.
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