Sunday Morning Meds--The Rivers Form

 

But at your rebuke the waters fled,

at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;

they flowed over the mountains,

they went down into the valleys,

to the place you assigned for them. Psalm 104

To record all of this, there would have to be a helicopter running for centuries on solar power, I suppose. It could be positioned almost anywhere; but I would choose some place on the eastern edge of the Rockies, where I’d position that whirlybird a mile high or more and start the camera rolling in time-lapse mode.

One can only imagine. An endless sea shakes out waves rhythmically, when suddenly, unperceptively at first, a mountain begins to emerge, jagged, triangular. Years pass, and that single peak is surrounded by a host of siblings, all rising until that sea forms waterways that rush with tidal-like power. There are no Badlands. The whole landscape is water—or ice.

We’re a long way from the Plains, from the flat land, but if that camera pans east, it catches the way the water bellies down over a region where there are no silhouettes—or none so startling as the peaks beneath us, now hugely revealed.

We don’t have that big of a camera, so the helicopter sallies off in that direction, where the water levels out and recedes from land, then falls into crevices, cracks, and fissures, and ten thousand lakes in a place someone will call, an age or three from now, Minnesota. A vast network—a spider web—of rivers push the land into valleys and settle in, as permanently as anything can in nature.

It’s time-lapse photography, but the phenomenon is stupefying. All that water settles into routine, that mass of chaos into order. The Badlands appear.

That’s what the psalmist sees. There, to the east, the Mississippi widens, while beneath us the Missouri, the Mud, spatters on south. Everywhere from this height, myriad meandering tributaries have formed, like lifelines on your hands. And it all works. Land has been called into being from a vast sea, and that immense space is veined with life, with water.

I know scientists who would laugh at the film we just shot because the whole process didn’t happen like that. There were vast seas all right—and there were frozen, vast seas. There was an ice age or two, and immense bulldozing glaciers. And there was mystery.

I don’t think the poet has it right, scientifically. The psalmist knew little of research, had no clue about glaciers or aquifers. But when he sat in his helicopter and recorded what he saw, the images arranged themselves in such a way as to form the face of the Creator right before his eyes. That much he’s got dead-on.

There’s a place someplace south of the Badlands where locals say Crazy Horse is buried. No one knows for sure, but the story goes that his favorite land was a ridge of pines that stands like a refuge amid the open, short-grass prairie, a neighborhood more emerald than anything around it. To get there, drive forever on a gravel road—and then just imagine. Follow rivers until you see the beauty he did.

Because the heavens declare the glory of God, all nations hear the sermons. Psalm 104 is how the psalmist thinks about the preaching God does in land and sea all around. What you see is his sermon.

I, for one, am blessed by what he sees of God’s own world around him, and thankful for his gift, in part because I know what’s in the poet’s heart and soul—because I think I’ve seen at least part of what he sees and hears of the Creator.