O Dawn

O Dawn, splendor of eternal light and sun of justice: come!  Give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death!
 
O Oriens
 
First light and then first lines along the east
To touch and brush a sheen of light on water
As though behind the sky itself they traced
The shift and shimmer of another river
Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;
The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.
Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice
Are bathing in it now, away upstream…
So every trace of light begins a grace
In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling;
“Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream
For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking”.
 
Poem: Malcolm Guite; Image: Adam Boulter
 
Jesus is our dawn of hope, the light coming into our darkness and our future forever.  Let us know ourselves called to be watchmen, sentinels who walk the walls of our earthly city, incessantly seeking the glimmer of dawn, and crying out to all in the city: “Here is our God.”  Let us be awakened from our world-weary sleep by the Sun of justice and the rustle of those healing wings, so that we can again arise to act out our hope before others.  Let us learn to dwell beneath the sometimes caressing, sometimes burning glow of deifying light, and so grow toward ever greater clarity in our commitment to Christ.  May we find the inner eye to see that “Darkness is not dark for you, and night shines as the day” (Ps 139:12), and so learn to live obscurity peacefully under the rays of eternal dawn.