Canticle of Creation

Can one ever grasp the fullness of God? We believe He is omnipotent - He lives wherever there is life and breath. All creation is bowed down before our Creator - let humanity embrace this holy submission. Blessings to you, Fr. Ed! A

Ed, your canticle and piece on the Tao are superb. Live long and prosper in your writing. Pax. Rod

I hope to be "gentle and yielding" till I die. At least, this is what I pray as I know at times I want to cling to my own way, my own knowledge and as I get older it sometimes seems the new is harder to learn. I figure if I keep my eyes on Jesus and how he acted I won't get too hard and unyielding.

Thankyou for some more good poetry.

I have been using Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim for over a decade. And I find it to be an excellent prayer book and a companion in all the seasons of life. I want to thank and congratulate Fr. Hayes for sharing his beautiful expressions of the Divine and the everyday with us. His book is a companion for my journey of faith.

Thanks be to God for Father Ed Hays, one of the brightest lights and signs of Hope in the Church.

.
thank you Father Hays,my copy of your Prayers for the Domestic Church is so worn I hold it together with rubber bands. Reading your prayers and books is a peace giving respite. I love your prayer action suggestion and wish especially that children growing up in ugly slums could spent time like that in God,s beautiful creation...maybe it would help protect them from the scary life they are in.

Mourning to Gladness

Following the births
of my daughters,
I was startled
by my sudden gift
of being able
to feed them.

If I am awed
by these events,
help my faith Lord,
when dear people die,
and I lack imagination
to picture
how they and I
will rise from the dead,
to everlasting life.

If the Christ
can feed a baby
through me,
surely resurrection
of the dead on the last day
is the very step
Jesus envisions
and plans for us all,
prior to holding,
touching and embracing
one another, our darlings,
in the Lord
for always.

Amen.

Why on earth would you subordinate the creation to Jesus-God come in the flesh. This prayer is incredibly bad Catholic Theology.

To the anonymous reader who finds the Canticle to Creation "incredibly bad Catholic Theology" I must admit that I am confounded by the comment. Taking the comment literally, is it bad theology to subordinate creation to the Incarnate God (Jesus)? Hardly, I would think. Or, perhaps the reader meant to object to what they perceived as the poet subordinating Jesus (referred to "second" Word made Flesh) to creation (referred to as the "first" Word made Flesh")? I suspect that is the reader's true objection but even so, the poem's theology is just fine. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, but Jesus did not exist until the moment of the Incarnation. In this sense, it is exactly true that Jesus was preceded by billions and billions of years of God's "words" (as used in Hay's poetic sense) at work bringing about the creation already present at the birth of Jesus. The Canticle to Creation does good work. The poem serves to remind us all that we (humanity) are not a separate creation of God, but that we are children of the Earth, and by extension, of the Universe. We are as firmly rooted in this rock and soil of this planet as is the tree that grows in my front yard. As such, our relationship with God can only be mediated through our relationship with all of Creation. The Universe is not a mere stage where the drama of our salvation is played out, it is the matrix of our very being, our very soul. We have forgotten this fact, but Fr. Hays beautifully brings us back to a proper sense of how God is revealed to each of us.

Thank you father, reading your prayers and books is a peace giving respite. I love your prayer action suggestion. Looking forward to see more things from you in future. find more articles