Echoes of God’s Grandeur

I am from the Grand Canyon state.  I quickly add it feels good to say that I have lived 62% of my life in Texas and am a father to three native Texans. I guess the frequently cited declaration fits: I was not born in Texas, but I got here as soon as I could. I do love the Lone Star state, and at the same time, I hold Arizona as dear always. Did you know that for a short time, Arizona was called the sweetheart state, because it was admitted into the Union as the 48th state on February 14, 1912, Valentine’s Day? That doesn’t come up very often, so you are lucky to have learned it here. The nickname did not last because it begs explanation. “The Grand Canyon State” never needs to be explained.

Perhaps you have never been to the Grand Canyon. As Texans, we would call it an overblown Palo Duro Canyon. Both are impressive. One of our Morning and Evening Prayer regulars, Jim Anderson, just returned from a road trip to the Grand Canyon state. Looking into a canyon or looking about from within a canyon is captivating. Huge and extensive canyons display visual beauty: the color and texture of the rock, and the grand size of the formations and cliffs.  The views strike awe in us also in that we know they have formed so slowly through thousands of millennia. Earth is firm and rock is hard but water and wind over time have their way of sculpting.

When you look at the walls of a canyon, at the mesas within it, you are looking at the record of geological time. The Red River (the Prairie Dog Town Fork of Red River) formed Palo Duro Canyon, and before humans knew the canyon, there were saber-toothed cats, mastodons, long-neck camels, and even rhinos about. There was water in the Ogallala aquifer, so there was life there in the Miocene and Pliocene ages. And those were more recent ages, relative to the entire formation of the canyon.

What all of this can do, if we are listening, is to provide a profound perspective. When we see the grandeur of nature, it can secure in our awareness the wonder of the Creator. We can find ourselves swept into what theologians call a “creature feeling” a kind of shrinking before all else. Instead of seeing ourselves as the center of the universe, which is how we mostly operate by necessity, for functioning, we see ourselves as a part of innumerable subjects of the creation. We see ourselves in a time frame of an unfathomable unfolding of time. Here are several of the couplets from Psalm 90, our responsive reading for this Sunday.

            Before the mountains were brought forth,
or the land and the earth were born, *
from age to age you are God.

            You turn us back to the dust and say, *
"Go back, O child of earth."

            For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past *
and like a watch in the night.

            You sweep us away like a dream; *
we fade away suddenly like the grass.

So teach us to number our days *
that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.

Notice how humility takes over in this psalm. We are not old; the mountains, rocks, and earth are old. And relative to God, the canyons, mountains, and oceans are brand new infants. God is from everlasting. We should number our days as an exercise of humility and as a chance for awe to fill us as we direct our attention to God. The rocks of the canyon cry out to us, and their voices sing of the unutterable majesty of God. Off of us bounce the truths of the grand and ancients’ rocks, and so echoes the message of the splendor and wonder of our Creator. Let us blend our own voices of praise with those sonorous echoes.