small portions

Last week, the editor and director of a pretty big church publishing company visited the seminary and distributed gift copies of a daily meditation/devotional to the faculty and staff. Thanks to my free gift, I began reading these daily devotionals on a regular basis -- more so than my poetry! -- and it made me wonder: why do we only want to get our meditations in small parcels? If I can overeat and overwork and oversleep, why is meditation and reflection parceled out in itty bits? The more for us to chew on? It just seems like another example of lazy meditating.

Or, it's like poetry. My kind of poetry.

Each word, each line, and each stanza is small enough for us to contemplate, and yet large enough to encompass the universe of sense feelings that make us who we are. It's like thinking of how much God is contained in one little cup of coffee taken with sugar and cream in the morning in front of the office window overlooking the maple tree rising into the sky.

And I think of how much easier for us to experience God in the little things, to see God only in parts. Like Moses shielding his face, only taking in the little bits that he is able to understand.

And while seeing the great in small parts, while contemplating the greatness of what we do not know, we must be careful not to reduce unnameable glory to very disjointed parts. Otherwise, the poem is all wrong. If if we're just seeing the wheel instead of the wheelbarrow and if it's just the wheelbarrow instead of the red wheelbarrow, and so on and so forth, we'll never know what we're missing...