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.