Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 266 · September 23
Made in Wisdom
“O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.”
Four in the morning on a residential street, the lights still on, and a fox crosses it at a trot, unhurried, on business of its own that concerns nobody asleep behind those windows.
Psalm 104 knows that hour. Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth. The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God. Then the shift changes: The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens. Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening. The psalm has already been through springs and wild asses and storks in the fir trees, and only after all that traffic does the line arrive: O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all. Proverbs states the same claim flatly, the LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth. The psalm is that sentence with the animals left in, including the one creature given no job in the poem at all: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.
The glory of the LORD shall endure for ever: the LORD shall rejoice in his works. That is the psalm's own line, written with lions and storks and something enormous playing in the water standing in front of it, and you are inside the same inventory. Go out under a sky nobody consulted you about. The fox will keep its rounds whether you see it or not, and the God who is glad in his own work is glad in the part of it that got out of bed as you this morning.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 266 is A New Thing Springs Forth (Isaiah 43:19).