Gratitude 46

I am grateful for the beautiful spring day, today.  It is still a bit chilly (twelve degrees in the sun), but everyone seems to be noting the improvement in the weather.  The trees are greener now and the flowers are abundant.   Especially the tulips and magnolias!  We all seem to flourish when the sun is shining.  I am hearing something on the radio right now about solar energy.  Unlike the fossil fuels industry, the solar and other renewables offer long term and permanent employment as well as a never ending source of renewable and nonpolluting energy.

I am grateful for the sun, that great blazing daystar in the sky without which nothing could live.  It is not a stretch to imagine that so many peoples and cultures throughout the world have worshipped the sun as a god.  It is very unfortunate that some of those cultures, the Aztecs come to mind, practiced human sacrifice in order to propitiate the sun god.

Why would it be even considered to slaughter innocent humans to satisfy the imagined blood thirst of an imaginary deity?  But the sun was never merely imaginary as a deity, and the idea of worshipping this heavenly body is even now, to this devout Christian, something remotely tempting and seductive.

Even in my art I love employing the motif of a giant yellow-orange sun in a turquoise sky as a brilliant background for my colourful bird drawings.  The sun really is the source, the very fount of our lives and our existence.  I don't worship the sun.  It is a creation of God whom I do worship.  But it is also a prototype or allegory of God as we often understand him, the creator and sustainer of all life.

The sun is, of course every bit as dangerous as beneficent, and everyone knows what a hazard solar radiation and ultraviolet light can be to the skin, and the lethal cancers that can result.  By the same token the sun also provides us with vitamin D, which is essential to our good health and vitality.  And we all know how popular beach resorts and all-inclusives are for foreign holidays because of the endless supply of tropical sun.

To image that our sun is only a minor, mediocre little star on the edge of our minor, mediocre little galaxy, and that we are surrounded by many greater and more wonderful suns and stars and galaxies that we will never really know.  This does not diminish the wonderfulness of our little daystar.  It certainly does carry us to a place beyond awe when we really begin to think of this universe in which we are privileged to live.