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Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Can You Hear What I Hear?


There’s the age old question:  If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

My question is: Does nature require that we are a witness to carry out what it was designed to do?  The answer is absolutely not.
In the book of Daniel there are chapters and verses Protestants have chosen to delete and which I was therefore deprived of knowing about in my pre-Catholic childhood.  One example tells us nature does in fact have a voice including The Prayer of Azariah in the Furnace.  Verse 1-2 of the prayer say, “And they walked about in the midst of the flames, singing hymns to God and blessing the Lord.  Then Azariah stood and offered this prayer; in the midst of the fire he opened his mouth……” 

He then began to praise God and to thank Him for all things in Creation.   He called on even the very  things we never consider to have a voice such as dew and rain, light and darkness, fire and heat, etc. to do the same.  He calls on each of them to also bless the Lord, obviously believing this was indeed possible.  Even the tree in the forest can praise Our Creator.



I was reminded of this at mass as our congregation sang carols together.  I smiled while I sang them as if for the first time really appreciating what the words tell us.

“And heaven and nature sing, And heaven and nature sing, And heaven and heaven and nature sing.

Or…..

Angels we have heard on high, Sweetly singing o’er the plains, And the mountains in reply echoing their joyous strains.

Or……..

For Christ is born of Mary, and gathered all above, while mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wond’ring love.  O Morning stars, together proclaim the holy birth.  And praises sing to God the King, and peace to men on earth.   


3 comments:

  1. One of the things of nature that we should know about is DNA in all living things that the
    Creator has created.DNA is like the finger of God through the ages and is an ordered system
    put in our material universe to fulfill His command "increase and multiply."This applies to
    all living things created by the Creator of our material universe.
    When we were being formed in our mother's womb it was our DNA that was doing the forming.
    Our mothers were giving us a safe place for us to form ourselves and providing food and
    nourishment for our growth.

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  2. Bernie, Another thing we should note is this: the world was not only created to have order, it remains orderly throughout time because the universe remains obedient to its nature. Only man has failed to obey and only man has forgotten God.

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  3. Of course the old joke about the husband in the middle of the forest saying something, and his wife and mother in law cannot hear: is he still wrong?

    Or, the watched pot never boils, to which I add: the unwatched pot not only boils instantly, but it burns the house down!

    Or, Dizzy Dean famously said, a particular restaurant got so popular and, hence, crowded that "nobody goes there anymore!"

    Obviously falsehoods, these. But they contain obvious common sense advice: Husbands are always wrong even nobody hears them! You'd better keep an eye on that pot! Find a great restaurant? Keep it quiet lest it gets too busy for you to find a table! And the same goes for that favorite short cut that bypasses traffic or toll roads! Ditto for the great auto mechanic, plumber, dentist, or they'll raise their prices, etc., etc., et al, ad nauseam!

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