Faith Topics
columns on Catholic teaching and spirituality from CatholicMom.com

Dawn – Hallowing the Beginning
by Drew Leader
excerpted from Sparks of the Divine: Finding Inspiration in Our Everyday World (pg. 28)

Go for an early morning walk – I mean early, before the sun has risen – to witness one of nature’s great secrets: the dawn. Why call this a secret? Everyone knows that every day begins with sunrise, but things can be hidden by their familiarity. Just as a fish is unaware of the water in which it swims, and we take for granted so much of what we have (our health, our family, the food we eat), so we are likely to overlook the dawn. The sacred is a secret not because it is concealed, but because it is everywhere revealed, but not as a revelation. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake,” writes Thoreau. Yet how much we sleepwalk through life!

So let us awake to the dawn as revelation. The miracle of creation – “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” – is reenacted each morning. To witness this is a privilege, like being present for the birthing of a child or the penning of a great symphony. What greater recreation than to witness recreation, the world again leaping into life?

When we arise later we’re likely to overlook the morning. After all, it’s laid out like a lavish breakfast already there when we awaken. (Who then thinks much of the preparatory work that went into it?) We’re apt to launch into the day far too quickly by virtue of greeting it too late. It’s light out. Time to get going – dressed, fed, and off to work. But in hastily doing so we profane the day. From the Latin “pro” (before) and “fanum” (temple), to be profane is to be outside the temple, or as the dictionary says, “not initiated into the inner mysteries, not hallowed or consecrated.” The day was not hallowed because it was not properly hello-ed. We wolf down our cereal and scan the morning paper with its usual morbid headlines. Yep, all is just as it was – only a little worse.

It need not be so. “Dawn” is an anagram for “wand.” Let’s reclaim sense of dawn as a magic wand that waves the world alive. We need not be today as we were yesterday. Who knows what the magician will pull out of today’s hat. A rabbit? A string of multi-colored scarves (not unlike the dawn itself)? All possibilities lie open, re-created afresh. This is the secret of the dawn, the sacred beginning of our day.
 

Excerpted from Sparks of the Divine: Finding Inspiration in Our Everyday World by Drew Leder. Copyright 2004 by Drew Leder. Used with the permission of the publisher, Sorin Books, P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556. www.sorinbooks.com.

 

Catholic Mom Recommends