daybreak’s moon

A rare experience of a moment at daybreak,
when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness,
cannot be explained at noon.
Yet it is part of the day’s unity.
Charles Ives

(starlings make their first flight of the day / Julie Cook / 2017)

‘Awake, my soul, awake! show thy spirit, arouse thy senses,
shake off the sluggishness of that deadly heaviness that is upon thee,
begin to take care for thy salvation.
Let the idleness of vain imaginations be put to flight, let go of sloth,
hold fast to diligence.
Be instant in holy meditations, cleave to the good things which are of God:
leaving that which is temporal, give heed to that which is eternal.
Now in this godly employment of thy mind,
to what canst thou turn thy thoughts more wholesomely and profitably than to
the sweet contemplations of thy Creator’s immeasurable benefits toward thee.’
St. Anselm of Canterbury

seeking daybreak

“There is a spiritual loneliness, an inner loneliness, an inner place where God brings the seeker, where he is as lonely as if there were not another member of the Church anywhere in the world.
Ah, when you come there, there is a darkness of mind, and emptiness of heart, a loneliness of soul, but it is preliminary to the daybreak. O God, Bring us, somehow to the daybreak!”
A.W. Tozer excerpts from various sermons…How to be Filled with the Holy Spirit

(grave of a forgotten young man, Colonial cemetery, Savannah, Ga / Julie Cook / 2016)

When excavating the locked chambers of the soul…
that quest for the missing piece to wholeness…
The path is narrow, fraught with both emptiness and loneliness
And the darkness will be exacting.

It is a journey few care to traverse…
Isolation is a key requirement…
The striping away of all exterior noise and distractions…
leaves exposed the innermost secrets of one’s very being.

God is exacting.
He is a selfish God, who wants all and will not settle for any less.
He wants not that which is freely offered, willingly given…
He wants, nay demands, that which is desperately held back.

The re-union of created and Creator is inevitable.
There are those who eagerly seek the synthesis, the rejoining…
While others vehemently fear it…
The fragility will shatter…into a million fractured shards…

Out of the mire, the sucking and suffocating quicksand of death…
The spirit longs to reach upward, yearning for home…
Yet it is in the depth of death’s vast darkness that the fractured soul searches…
While the Creator waits…

Bring us home oh Lord
Strip us of that which prevents us from being with you..
Deliver us out of…
the brokenness,
the loneliness,
the emptiness,
the isolation…
of self
Bringing us to the daybreak of You…