Daily Reading for May 6
As Julian of Norwich said, creation “would fall to naught for littleness” (Revelations, 5). To me this truth is sheer joy. His creation of you is not something that happened once, x many years ago; he is still at it. His healing, creative hands are upon your body, upon your mind, upon that fine point of your spirit where his likeness is stamped on you—not a static likeness but an evolving reality. The whole strength of his loving will is in that creative act by which he wants you, loves you, rejoices in your being; and you can let yourself go in joyful agreement with his creative will, saying with Jesus, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
When I was a child my father’s hands meant a great deal to me. They were the most beautiful hands I have ever seen: large, beautifully shaped, strong, very sensitive and kind. I have many memories of clinging to them, but one recurrent joy stands out, that of being bathed by him as a small child. He used to run plenty of water in the bath, and make it very soapy and then put his child in. He scorned flannels, sponges and other impediments and did the whole job with his hands, caressing the child all over. At the time I simply enjoyed it with a mixture of sensuous delight and love; since then the memory of it has become for me a kind of sacrament of resting in the loving, cleansing, healing, creative hands of God.
From “A Tapestry, from the Wrong Side,” by Maria Boulding, in A Touch of God: Eight Monastic Journeys, ed. Maria Boulding OSB (London: Triangle, 1988), 39.