Laudate Si means "Praise Be." My friend Betsey Crawford reminded me of that today in her lovely online journal, The Soul of the Earth, adding that "they are the opening words of each of the verses in Saint Francis’s beautiful Canticle to the Sun, and are also the title of Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical defining the Catholic Church’s doctrines on the care of the earth." Betsey adds, "I recently discovered that September 1st has been chosen as the annual World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. To join in a day meant to contemplate the glories of creation, and our role in caring for them, I've interwoven some of Pope Francis’ words with pictures of the great luminous beauty of our world."
I invite you to linger with me in reading and seeing Betsey's journal today. I say linger because like most things of consequence−most things for which we truly care−it cannot be done quickly or as part of some multitasked collection. Depending on one's tradition, a better description is contemplative, meditative or prayerful.
Some years ago, a remarkable man who is both a contemplative and a physicist, Arthur Zajonc, wrote a short essay he called "Meditation and the Practice of Virtue," exploring the ethical foundations of a meditative life. He begins by sharing two observations. The first is drawn from the work of one of his own teachers, the Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner, who maintained that "humility is the portal through which the contemplative practitioner should enter into the practice of meditation." The second is drawn from Albert Schweitzer's journal of a boat trip through narrow creeks in Africa. Schweitzer had been seeking a common ground for ethics, when suddenly, "late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, 'Reverence for Life.' The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible."
After sharing these two observations, Zajonc wrote, "Humility and reverence for life have become for me the portal and path into the meditative life."
He adds that three types of practices have been especially helpful in entering and cultivating the experiences of humility and reverence. The first is imagining and immersing oneself in the boundless beauty of nature. The second, not open to everyone, is prayer, "a way of redirecting ourselves away from the mundane to the essential dimensions of life." The third portal to humility and reverence, often more challenging, is to summon another person before us in our imagination, "and cultivate reverence before the mystery and preciousness of their being."
Having just written the above words, I interrupted this writing to walk to a class, where, as fortune or fate would have it, that third portal was beautifully illustrated in a short passage I had offered the class to read and discuss, an excerpt from Viktor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning. Remembering his experience as a prisoner in a German concentration camp during World War II, Frankl describes a particular moment:
"We were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious 'Yes' in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. 'Et lux in tenebris lucet' — and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me."