Morning Prayer

Oh God, the Author of all good,
     I come to thee for the grace another day will require for its duties and events.

I step out into a wicked world,
I carry about with me a wicked heart,
I know that without thee I can do nothing,
     that everything with which I shall be concerned,
     however harmless in itself,
     may prove an occasion of sin or folly,
     unless I am kept by thy power.
Hold me thou up and I shall be safe.

Preserve my understanding from subtlety of error,
     my affections from love of idols,
     my character from stain of vice,
     my profession from every form of evil.

May I engage in nothing in which I cannot implore thy blessing,
     and in which I cannot invite thy inspection.

Prosper me in lawful undertakings,
     or prepare me for disappointments.

Give me neither poverty nor riches;
     feed me with food convenient for me,
     lest I be full and deny thee and say, Who is the Lord?
     or be poor, and steal, and take thy name in vain.

May every creature be made good to me by prayer and thy will;
Teach me how to use the world, and not abuse it,
     to improve my talents,
     to redeem my time,
     to walk in wisdom toward those without, and in kindness to those within,
     to do good to all men, and especially my fellow Christians

And to thee be the glory.

-The Valley of Vision

Morning

But what is truly strange is that I never liked mornings when I could have them with real sunrises and real dew on real roses and real paperboys wrecking real bicycles on the sidewalk outside my window. How I could ever have remained asleep and voluntarily missed a sunrise, I can't explain.

 

-N. D. Wilson, Leepike Ridge, 141.

Waking Up

I would appreciate it if they would call a halt on all their devoted efforts to find a way to abolish war or eliminate disease or run trains with atoms or extend the span of human life to a couple of centuries, and everybody concentrate for a while on how to wake me up in the morning without my resenting it. It may be that a bevy of beautiful maidens in pure silk yellow very sheer gowns, barefooted, singing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning and scattering rose petals over me would do the trick, but I'd have to try it.

-Rex Stout’s character Archie Goodwin (hat tip Terry Teachout)

When You Wake Up in the Morning...

Later on, when they had all said “Good-bye” and “Thank-you” to Christopher Robin, Pooh and Piglet walked home thoughtfully together in the golden evening, and for a long time they were silent.

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

“It’s the same thing,” he said.

-A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 159-160.

Morning

Awakening

Here we are now with the falling sky and the rain,
We're awakening
Here we are now with the desperate youth in pain,
We're awakening
Maybe it's called ambition, but you've been talking in your sleep
About a dream
We're awakening

-Switchfoot

Sometimes by Step

Sometimes the night was beautiful
Sometimes the sky was so far away
Sometimes it seemed to stoop so close
You could touch it but your heart would break
Sometimes the morning came too soon
Sometimes the day could be so hot
There was so much work left to do
But so much you'd already done

Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me
He was a stranger in this land
And I am that, no less than he
And on this road to righteousness
Sometimes the climb can be so steep
I may falter in my steps
But never beyond your reach

Oh God, you are my God
And I will ever praise you
I will seek you in the morning
And I will learn to walk in your ways
And step by step you'll lead me
And I will follow you all of my days

-Rich Mullins and Beaker

Come Unto Me

Come unto me. Come unto me, you say. All right then, dear my Lord. I will try in my own absurd way...For who am I? I know only that heel and toe, memory and metatarsal, I am everything that turns, all of a piece, unthinking, at the sound of my name. Am where my feet take me. Buechner. Come unto me, you say. I, Buechner, all of me, unknowing and finally unknowable even to myself, turn. O Lord and lover, I come if I can to you down through the litter of any day, through sleeping and waking and eating and saying goodbye and going away and coming back again. Laboring and laden with endless histories heavy on my back.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 28-29.

A Bit of Hoovering

It was eight o’clock on a warm May morning. Mr. Brown was in the bathroom singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Mrs. Brown was in the kitchen mixing homemade muesli and chopping bananas for breakfast. Ten-year-old Betsy was brushing her hair while revising for a French test. Nine-year-old Brian was watching an item on TV about Cruft’s Dog Show. Baby Brown was upstairs in his cot.

The family gathered in the kitchen and sat down to breakfast. Mr. Brown mentioned a big financial deal he was handling at the bank; he was the Assistant Manager. Betsy spoke enthusiastically of her French test, in which she was expecting to do well. Brian apologized for the state of his room and said he would tidy it up after school. Mrs. Brown nodded amiably but otherwise said little. She was looking forward to a having the house to herself and getting on with a bit of hoovering.

Silence. Immobility. Shock.

‘Hang on a minute.’ Mrs. Brown lowered her spoon. ‘What’s all this? “Looking forward to a bit of hoovering”?’ A puzzled frown. ‘I hate hoovering.’

‘I hate muesli, come to that,’ said Mr. Brown, staring perplexedly into his bowl.

‘Me, too!’ cried Brian.

‘And I hate French!’ Betsy yelled.

Silence again as the Browns considered their unusual situation.

Mrs. Brown said, ‘Who writes this rubbish?’

-Allan Ahlberg, The Better Brown Stories, 2-3.

Who Will Buy?

Who will buy
This wonderful morning?
Such a sky
You never did see!

Who will tie
It up with a ribbon
And put it in a box for me?

So I could see it at my leisure
Whenever things go wrong
And I would keep it as a treasure
To last my whole life long.

Who will buy
This wonderful feeling?
I'm so high
I swear I could fly.

Me, oh my!
I don't want to lose it
So what am I to do
To keep the sky so blue?
There must be someone who will buy...

-Oliver

Sneezes

Not long ago, I walked out the door of my house on a clear, cold morning and was thinking pure business when, halfway across the porch, I felt that familiar pleasant wave in the chest—the magnetic field of the sneeze—and the long intake of breath and the pulsation in the head. I wound up, reared back, and delivered a sneeze worthy of Pavarotti—a six-syllable sneeze that sounded like "onomatopoeia!" On the accented syllable I stamped my foot (wham!) on the wooden floor, and then the majestic cry (and wham!) came bouncing back to me off the house across the street. I thought, God bless you! I said good morning to the bunch of children who wait for their schoolbus on my corner. They appeared to be awestruck. I climbed into my car and drove off, and at the corner the stoplight turned a luminous green.

-Garrison Keillor, We Are Still Married, 163-164.

O, High King

And you will see faces before this first day is done: each the only one of its kind in the universe, each the face of a high king whose line reaches back unbroken through unnumbered generations, through ancient cities and forgotten battles, past dim, gibbering rain forests to the very beginnings of history itself and beyond, and they will speak to you in words soft and worn from centuries of handling, will say A, B and C to you, E and F and G and H, and will say O to you, O, O, high king to high king as you meet in the mystery of this rainy morning while the cat buries her mess by the broken red wagon and leaves the color of sunrise fall out of the sky.

-Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace, 37-38.

Morning Prayer

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, in whom we live and move and have our being; We, thy needy creatures, render thee our humble praises, for thy preservation of us from the beginning of our lives to this day, and especially for having delivered us from the dangers of the past night...

AND since it is of thy mercy, O gracious Father, that another day is added to our lives; We here dedicate both our souls and our bodies to thee and thy service, in a sober, righteous, and godly life: in which resolution, do thou, O merciful God, confirm and strengthen us; that, as we grow in age, we may grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

-The Book of Common Prayer, 1892 Edition

The Windhover: To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

-Gerard Manly Hopkins

Camp Songs #7

Way up in the sky
The little birds fly
While down in the nest
The little birds rest

With a wing on the left
And a wing on the right
The little birds sleep
All through the night

Shhhh. THEY'RE SLEEPING!

The bright sun comes up
The dew falls away
"Good morning, good morning"
The little birds say

Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manly Hopkins

Do it Again

The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

-G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Morning Prayer

We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory, but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government. And this, so far as I can yet see, must be begun again every day. Our morning prayer should be that in the Imitation: Da hodie perfecte incipere—grant me to make an unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet.

-C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, “A Slip of the Tongue”