Tag Archives: Muslim-Christian

The Days of Genesis: Genesis 1:1-19

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The days that unfold in the Book of Genesis we’re reading this week get ever more complex. Before all,  there is God, Creator of all things, then light and water paving the way for a host of new things, non-living and living. Finally, we humans enter the picture. A complex, changing world it is, day by day.

Jessica Powers, a Carmelite nun and poet, wrote about our experience of that world– “Song At Daybreak”

This morning on the way

that yawns with light across the eastern sky

and lifts its bright arms high –

It may bring hours disconsolate or gay,

I do not know, but this much I can say:

It will be unlike any other day.

God lives in his surprise and variation.

No leaf is matched, no star is shaped to star.

No soul is like my soul in all creation

though I may search afar.

There is something -anquish or elation-

that is peculiar to this day alone.

I rise from sleep and say: Hail to the morning!

Come down to me, my beautiful unknown.

“My Beautiful unknown”. Our world is beautiful, but unknown, surprising, with variations that bring “anguish or elation.” Religious people should acknowledge this, since they believe in God who lives “in his surprise and variation”, but unfortunately we can make God too small. We “think like humans do.” The Book of Genesis describes our common home, complex, “willed by God in His wisdom.”

The Genesis account and the rest of the Bible deserve a search for their wisdom. I know there’s a new story that science tells, but Genesis and the Bible were there first. We should listen to that story too.

The Pope in Albania

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Pope Francis made a one day trip on September 21, 2014 to Albania, a small mountainous country on the Adriatic Sea. One newspaper said “Francis’s decision to choose tiny, poverty-ridden Albania instead of one of the continent’s big Catholic powers for his first European trip as pontiff is in keeping with a papacy that wants to give priority to the poor and the neglected.”

He had other reasons too. Albania, with a Muslim majority, has Catholics and Orthodox Christians among its citizens. The pope praised the respect and trust between these groups as a powerful sign in today’s world. Other countries in Europe and the rest of the world, experiencing the effects of immigration and resettlement, need to emulate its example.

“May no one use religion as a pretext for actions against human dignity and against the fundamental rights of every man and woman, above all to the right to life and the right of everyone to religious freedom,” Pope Francis said.

“This is especially the case in these times where an authentic religious spirit is being perverted by extremist groups and where religious differences are being distorted and instrumentalised.”

Here’s a great story of Albanian inter-religious cooperation from ABCnews.