Beauty & All Souls and Saints: Week 23 of Ordinary Time

Look: Girl Standing in Mist of Heaven, Lorenzo Scott - Source

Listen: Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, Julie Lee (The A Rocha Project) - Lyrics | Spotify | YouTube

Here’s a playlist to listen today and tomorrow for All Souls & All Saints

Read: Deuteronomy 6:1-9; Psalm 119:1-16; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 12:28-34 OR readings for All Saint’s Day: Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 24; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

Readings for the rest of the week*: 2 Chronicles 2-4; Psalm 27; Psalm 45; Psalm 48; Mark 9:2-8; Revelation 21:9-21

Pray: Book of Common Prayer, Collect for All Saint’s Day

Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Do: For the final seven weeks of Ordinary Time, we’ll consider God’s gifts of work and rest - both spiritual acts of worship.

Bobby Gross introduces this week’s chapter:

“Beauty invites contemplation. After each episode of creation, God appraises his work and finds it good. The trees in the first garden are not only good for food, they are pleasing to the eye. God created us with aesthetic sensibilities. We are draw to the beautiful because the beautiful points us to God and moves us to worship. Of course, we can also idolize beauty, as Ezekiel 16 dramatizes. So in addition to daily bread and sabbath rest, God invites us to contemplate the beautiful - and, we could add, the good and the true. Our texts for this week highlight beauty in several ways: the artistic craftsmanship of the temple, the loveliness of a royal wedding, the impressive skyline of a city and the luminous glory of God’s face."

In what ways do you make room in your life for beauty? How have you taken time to see it and contemplate it? (Hint: At the very least, you’ve been making space in your inbox each Sunday to receive art and music with this Daybook Meditation!) This week, choose one way to encounter beauty - creation, art, architecture, music, poetry, a person, an idea, an icon - and let that experience stir in you both love and longing for God, the source of all that is good, true, and beautiful.

Related: All Saints and Souls posts from the Daybook Meditations archives

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*During Ordinary Time this year, I’ll be sharing readings from the excellent devotional guide, Living the Christain Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God by Bobby Gross. While it’s not necessary to purchase the book to follow along with us, it’s an excellent resource we’ve dog-eared so often the pages are falling out of our copy!