An Excerpt from the Centerpiece: A Meditation on Isaiah 40:6b-8
Author’s suggestion: Read this passage as it was written: slowly, meditatively, one breath per line, waiting on God to speak it into your heart as he spoke it into mine.
Isaiah 40:6b-8:
“All people are like grass,
And all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
The grass withers and the flowers fade,
Because the breath of the Lord blows upon them.
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers and the flowers fade,
But the word of our God endures forever.”
Sitting in silence, waiting on God
with the heart of a true servant,
we become passively open to all things life may bring.
At the same time, we are actively aware
of God’s gracious lovingkindness,
of God as the Logos, the eternal Word of truth,
in all that we think and feel and in all that we are.
In this place of waiting,
we watch our breaths come and go, arise and pass away.
We watch our thoughts arise,
flourish in our minds for a few moments or long minutes,
then gradually fade away.
We behold sensations, memories, emotions,
all come to birth in our conscious awareness,
run their course, and melt into oblivion
like chunks of ice at the edge of a river,
each in its turn.
Each idea, each fantasy, each moment from our past,
longing to be relived or refashioned into something better—
each creature that arises in our minds
lives its brief but unique and self-important life,
then thins like the waning moon
and finally disappears, never to be seen again.
Thus pass our hours, our meals, our days, our projects,
our desires, our plans, our years and our lives.
Over the course of history, philosophies surface, evolve,
gather adherents
convinced of the purity and rightness of their beliefs.
Books are written about them,…
nations go to war over them,
blood is shed for them,…
Then, one day, those philosophies
once thought to be impregnable fortresses
show signs of aging.
The fortress walls begin to wear out, to weaken,
and eventually to waste away to crumbled nothing,
to be all but forgotten,
as new philosophies show their faces,
gain strength and become preeminent
for the brief centuries given them,
only to be in turn relegated
to archaic words on faded pages
in forgotten history books
on dusty shelves in lonely libraries.
So go the ways and works of humanity.
So pass the nations and empires and ages of the world.
So are the generations of man…
And in the midst of all this change
is the Unchanging One
who alone can change our hearts to be like his.
Lord of the Harvest, I’ve heard him called;
Jehovah, Yahweh, I Am That I Am,
the All-in-All, King of Kings and Lord of Lords,
the Lion and the Lamb, Alpha and Omega.
His word creates all things;
his breath gives life to all things;
his will establishes or allows or ends all things;
his love covers all things.
All men, all creatures, all lands, the earth,
even the universe itself,
are the grass that withers, the flowers that fade;
but the word of our God will stand forever.
May we rest in him,
and may our breath flow as one with his breath,
our thoughts surrender to his mind,
our hearts beat with his heart,
our spirits reflect his beauty,
our lives be signposts to point to his glory…
Book excerpt from Contemplation: Only the Crucified are Truly Alive
Gary Michael Hassig
From the Centerpiece, pp. 123-7, 129-30
