Creation
Creation Spirituality
Sunday, January 25, 2015
(Feast of St. Paul)
For what can be known about God is plain . . . because God has shown it. . . . Ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible nature, namely, God’s eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.
–Paul to the Romans (1:20)
God always and forever comes as one who is totally hidden and yet perfectly revealed in the same moment or event. The first act of divine revelation is creation itself. As discussed in last week’s meditations, it is the first Bible of nature itself, which was written approximately 14 billion years before the Bible of words. God initially speaks through what is, as we see Paul affirming above.
It is interesting that in the biblical account, creation is done developmentally over six days, almost as if there was an ancient intuition of what we would eventually call evolution. Notice that on the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth days it says that what God created was “good” (Genesis 1:9-31); but on the first and second days it does not say it was good! The first day is the separation of darkness from light, and the second day is the separation of the heavens above from the earth below (1:3-8). The Bible does not say that is good–because it isn’t! The precise reason that Jesus is the icon of salvation for so many of us is because he holds these seeming contraries together so beautifully, thus telling us we can do the same.
After the Creation story, you could say that the rest of the Bible is about trying to put those seeming opposites of darkness and light, heavens and earth, flesh and spirit, back together, first inside of ourselves and then everywhere else too. They have never really been separate of course, but “sin” thinks so. The Bible calls the state of separateness “sin,” and the essential task of all religion is to reconnect people to their original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). This reuniting comes through forgiving and even loving, as Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)” (“Pied Beauty”).
Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality,
pp. 15, 29, 32-33
In this stabilized time-lapse, the stars’ position in the night sky is fixed so you can get a sense of our planet’s movement through space. And now it’s time for some mind-boggling figures:
– Earth rotates around its axis (at the Equator) at roughly 460 meters/second (503 yards/second)
– Earth orbits around our Sun at about 107,826 km/h (67,000 mph)
– Our solar system whirls around the center of the Milky Way galaxy roughly 788,579 km/h (490,000 mph)
You can read more about how fast Earth is moving in comparison to other objects at Scientific American.
St. Anthony This Week
Monday, January 26
Tuesday, January 27
D-E-A-R DAY/Family Literacy Day:
Tuesday, January 27th is Family Literacy Day in Canada. The theme this year is
“15 Minutes of Family Fun”. I have put up posters and there will be a reminder in the school blog and on Twitter.
We, here at St. Anthony, will be marking the day by doing random announcements throughout the day to Drop Everything And Read! (DEAR)for 15 minutes.
Please encourage the students to choose a book first thing in the morning or have their library book handy so as to get the maximum reading time in.
Thank you for supporting this activity:)
Cathlee O’Connell to read with Mrs.Rupnik’s class
10:30 meeting with Parent – Debra, Paul, Geraldine
Chess club
Paul out (PM) Family of Schools 12:00 PM St. Nicholas School
Dorothy reading with Mrs. Rupnik’s class
Our first Table Tennis class – 3:15 – 4:15
The instructor is Horatio Pintea.
During his time on the Canadian Table Tennis National team, Horatio Pintea has participated in all major competitions including the 1988 and 1996 Olympics as well as numerous World Championship and World Cups. He has represented Canada in 5 Pan American Games (1983, 1987, 1991, 1995, 1999) and has managed to capture at least one medals in each of the Pan American Games.
He is also the North American Champion, Canadian Champion.
Now he is actively playing Racketlon.
Wednesday, January 28
Y Kids Academy – 11:30 – 1:30PM Grade 5-6
Paul out (PM)
Thursday, January 29
Time for our monthly assembly
- girls Badminton
- boys Badminton
- environmental awards
- grade 6 Valentines Bake Sale
Young Rembrandts – 2nd session – 3:15 – 4:15
Friday, January 30
Pizza Day!
Little Horn Theatre * MUSIC WITH AUDREY LEMIEUX
missing anything? Please let me know and I will add this to our weekly schedule
by Maria Popova
From Brain Pickings – a wonderful weekly blog
A heartening testament to the power of undivided intention.
“One should want only one thing and want it constantly,” young André Gide half-observed, half-resolved in his journal. “Then one is sure of getting it.”More than a century later, Werner Herzog wrote passionately of the “uninvited duty” that a sense of purpose plants in the heart, leaving one with “no choice but to push on.” That combination of desiring something with inextinguishable intensity — which begins with letting your life speak and daring to listen — and pursuing it with steadfast doggedness is perhaps the single common thread in the lives of those we most admire as luminaries of enduring genius. It is also at the heart of what it means to find your purpose and live it.
As a lover of illustrated biographies of cultural icons — such as those of Pablo Neruda, Julia Child, Albert Einstein, and Maria Merian — I was thrilled to stumble upon a wonderful take on the early life of one of my greatest heroes,Jane Goodall, and how she came to live the dream that bewitched her at a young age. In Me…Jane (public library), celebrated cartoonist, author, and animal rights advocate Patrick McDonnell tells the story of how the seed planted by a childhood dream blossomed, under the generous beams of deep dedication, into the reality of a purposeful life.
McDonnell’s protagonist is not Jane Goodall the widely influential and wildly revered elder of science and peace — one of a handful of people in history to have both the titles Dame and Doctor, and the subject of a very different illustrated biography — but little Jane, the ten-year-old girl who decided that she was going to work with animals in Africa when she grew up and, despite her family’s poverty, despite living in an era when girls were not encouraged to live the life of science or adventure, despite nearly everyone telling her that it was impossible, turned her dream into reality.
With simple, enormously expressive illustrations and an eloquent economy of words, McDonnell — creator of the beloved MUTTS comic strip — begins at the very beginning: that fateful day when little Jane was given a stuffed monkey named Jubilee.
Jane and Jubilee became inseparable, and she shared with him everything she loved — especially the outdoors. Together, they watched the birds and the spiders and the squirrels fill the backyard with aliveness.
At night, Jane and Jubilee read books to better understand what they saw.
One day, tickled to find out where eggs came from, they snuck into grandma’s chicken coop and observed the miracle of life.
It was a magical world full of joy and wonder, and Jane felt very much a part of it.
Jane liked to climb her beloved beech tree with Jubilee on her back, then sit perched on its branches reading and rereading Tarzan, imagining herself in place of that other Jane, wild and filled with wonder amid the jungles of Africa.
That dream soon became an all-consuming desire not just to go to Africa but to live there, trying to understand the animals and help them.
Every night Jane tucked Jubilee into bed and fell asleep with that dream, until one day — and such is the genius of McDonnell’s elegantly simple message of the dreamer’s doggedness — she awakes in a tent in the Gombe, the seedbed of what would become a remarkable career and an extraordinary life of purpose.
Goodall herself — who founded the heartening youth-led learning and community action initiative Roots & Shoots — writes in the afterword:
We cannot live through a single day without making an impact on the world around us — and we have a choice as to what sort of difference we make… Children are motivated when they can see the positive results their hard work can have.
Me…Jane, which received the prestigious Caldecott Honor and is a spectacular addition to these great children’s books celebrating science and scientists, is an emboldening treasure from cover to cover. Complement it with Goodall onscience and spirituality, her answers to the Proust Questionnaire, and her ownlittle-known children’s book, then treat yourself to “Dream Jane Dream” — a magnificent homage to Goodall by jazz singer-songwriter Lori Henriques:
Glacier Point, an overlook with a commanding view of Yosemite Valley, Half Dome, Yosemite Falls, and Yosemite’s high country, is accessible by car from approximately late May through October or November. From mid-December through March, cross-country skiers can experience this view after skiing 10.5 miles.
From the Glacier Point parking and tour unloading area, a short, paved, wheelchair-accessible trail takes you to an exhilarating (some might say unnerving) point 3,214 feet above Curry Village, on the floor of Yosemite Valley. [source]
Yosemite National Park covers an area of 761,268 acres (3,080.74 km2) and over 3.7 million people visit each year. It was designated a World Heritage Site in 1984. [source]
