Glimpses of Glory. David Adam
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PRAYERS FOR THE CHURCH YEAR
DAVID ADAM
Copyright © 2000 by David Adam
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK)
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The Revised Common Lectionary © 1992 The Consultation on Common Texts. The Church of England adaptations to the Principal Service lectionary (which form part of the Common Worship lectionary as published in The Christian Year: Calendar, Lectionary and Collects) © 1995 and 1997 The Central Board of Finance of the Church of England, are reproduced by permission.
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Contents
David Adam was born in Alnwick, Northumberland, and is now the Vicar of Holy Island. He was Vicar of Danby in North Yorkshire for over twenty years, where he discovered a gift for composing prayers in the Celtic pattern. His first book of these, The Edge of Glory, achieved immediate popularity, and he has since published several collections of prayers and meditations based on the Celtic tradition. His books have been translated into various languages, including Finnish and German, and have appeared as American editions.
Introduction
I love misty days when the sun suddenly breaks through; sometimes I have purposely driven high into the hills to rise out of the fog, knowing that it is low-lying fog and it can be overcome. At the moment you nearly come out of the fog it takes on a strange brightness, a luminosity that promises something different. Then suddenly you are in a land of brightness and everything seems to be bathed in a new glory: sometimes it is as if the world is being totally renewed in colour and splendour, and we see creation taking place.
On Holy Island the main windows of our house face the west and the sunsets. On some cloudy days the sun manages at sunset to drop beneath the clouds and flood the land with light, every pool and bend in the river picks up that light in a reflected glory. It is then good to stop whatever you are doing for a few moments and let that glory enter you also. Occasionally I have to climb a small hill to see the reflected light better; I have to turn aside from what I am doing and take note of what is going on around me; I have to make an effort to behold the glory. Glory does suddenly break into our lives, yet we have to make the effort to see and experience it. R. S. Thomas speaks of this experience of glory in his poem ‘The Bright Field’:
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying ...
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush: to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
(R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945–1990, Phoenix Giant, p. 302)
Life is not hurrying, and yet we seem to speed from one thing to another and never stay long in one place. We have little time to soak up the atmosphere and are in danger of letting the glory pass by, or we bypass it ourselves. If we are to get glory into our lives we have to learn to travel and to see a new way, and that includes looking at ourselves in wonder and awe: we need to know the Divine is within us in all his glory. In his Confessions, Augustine complains:
Men go abroad to wonder at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars:
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
(Confessions, Book X, 8.15)
Too often we are found collecting more information, or video recordings, when we could be allowing the glory to break into our lives. We are offered glimpse after glimpse of glory and yet we fail to see: it is as if our hearts are hardened and our eyes are blind. We do not create glory, it is all about us, we need to open ourselves to it. God’s world is full of his glory, he is ever present and within it. The world and all who live upon it are in the heart of God and God is within the heart of every piece of his creation. If you have not experienced this it is because you have not looked deep enough or long