Morning Has Broken

I woke up this morning at first light as the dawn edged around the curtains and daylight crept into my house from the high windows in the living room that run down the whole side of the house. The light reaches all the way across to the hallway outside my bedroom. At this time of the year I also still have a few of the shades up a little from the summer pattern of letting air in although the windows are now locked down for the coming winter.

The words, "Morning has broken like the first morning" sang in my head as I watched the light grow stronger and I thought "what a nice way to wake up." For years I have had the luxury of waking with the light rather than to the sound of an alarm, but this is the first time in many months that my mind has turned to the words of this song/hymn.

First a hymn, it became a popular song in the seventies sung by Cat Stevens. I looked for the words on the net and found that I had long been conflating the first and last verses, so that what I was singing in my head was, "Morning has broken like the first morning.....God's recreation of the new day."

I loved the song and was surprised, some years after its time on the charts, to see the verses included in the Liturgy of the Hours. That is when I discovered that it is a hymn. God's recreation (re-creation) of the new day is an image I have been fond of ever since. This morning as I waited for the light to fill my house so that I could rise without needing to turn on a light, I pondered its meaning. I should have written this post immediately, because much of what I was thinking has been dissipated by the cares of the day--fighting with a bad Internet connection that is making life miserable, washing dishes and paperwork.

Still the gist of what I was thinking was on the relationship of recreation to re-creation. Prayer, worship, sharing meals with others, gardening, laughter and making things with our hands and minds seems to me to be in the nature of re-creation. We use ourselves in the ways that the Creator intended and are connected to Creation, completing a cycle each day so that we may rest and begin anew the next day.

Recreation, on the other hand, the passive entertainment that passes for recreation in our overly technological world, disconnects us from ourselves, from our true purpose in life, from meaning and of course, ultimately from our Creator. It may contribute to keeping us from resting and from being productive in truly human ways.

As I looked for a link on the Internet to the text for Morning Has Broken--which I found here http://www.events-in-music.com/morning-has-broken.html --I discovered that there is a Christmas carol set to the same tune. It can be found here http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/c/h/childman.htm
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It is a carol that I hope to come back to as Christmas arrives. The tune it seems is Celtic.

I wish you true recreation--re-creating--tomorrow and the next day and the days hereafter and good rest this night.

I am grateful for that light this morning and for the thoughts it gave me as well as the beautiful day that it gave me as well. I will be even more grateful if and when my DSL finally works as it is supposed to!