Consider

Consider

 

“Find a time, every day, when you will ‘consider’ – when you will look deeply, attentively, thoughtfully at one thing. Don’t do anything else but that one thing. It may be looking intensely at the leaf of a tree, or a feather, or an icon, or one or two words from Scripture.

“Don’t move on. Stay with it. Look into it. Try to see – to see its inscape.

“You may find it very difficult at first. You may get very bored. But keep looking at it.

“It’s charged – charged with the grandeur of God.”

Every morning I receive a daily email “Word” from the brothers of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal monastic community in Cambridge, Mass.

Early Saturday May 20 I read Br. Geoffrey Tristam’s encouragement that we “consider.”  I learned a new word, “inscape.”  I vowed to consider deeply that day.

By 9:30 I was at our Blue Theology Mission Station in Pacific Grove, greeting 15 folks from the San Lorenzo Community Church UCC who had come to spend a day doing ocean stewardship and spirituality. It was an intergenerational group, from kids to grandparents.

Before we set out for a day of learning and serving, I gave them each (as we do each group) a Blue Theology backpack and notepad.

Ten year old Owen wrote carefully all day in his notebook, as we took a pilgrimage walk by the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, stopped four times to offer prayers of wow, help, sorry and thank you, talked at the Aquarium about the amazing diversity in God’s creation and found too much stuff at our beach cleanup that did not belong in nature. 

I told them how I had read Br. Geoffrey on “consider” that very morning.  I said the word’s derivation was “to sit with.”  I encouraged them to consider, to sit with, God’s ocean and one small thing in it, most certainly charged with God’s grandeur.

Owen got it.  He noted it.  He did it.  He sat with.  (Actually he considered way more than one thing.  He considered the harbor seal moms and pups, the hammerhead sharks, the sea otters in the bay, and more.) 

He considered and he was “considerate” of others and of ocean life.  He gave me hope.

We love having groups of all ages spend a day or more at the Blue Theology Mission Station – we hope you’ll consider it.  Bluetheology.com