“To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.”

The Divine Image by William Blake (1757 – 1827), poet and visual artist, born on this day

“Every particle of the world is a mirror,
In each atom lies the blazing light
of a thousand suns.
Cleave the heart of a raindrop,
a hundred pure oceans will flow forth.
Look closely at a grain of sand,
The seed of a thousand beings can be seen.
The foot of an ant is larger than an elephant;
In essence, a drop of water
is no different than the Nile.
In the heart of a barley-corn
lies the fruit of a hundred harvests;
Within the pulp of a millet seed
an entire universe can be found.
In the wing of a fly, an ocean of wonder;
In the pupil of the eye, an endless heaven.
Though the inner chamber of the heart is small,
the Lord of both worlds
gladly makes his home there.”

Mahmud Shabestari (c. 1250 – 1320), Persian Sufi master

“The exercise of force is contrary to the principles of God’s government; He desires only the service of love; and love cannot be commanded; it cannot be won by force or authority. Only by love is love awakened.”

Ellen G. White (1827 – 1915), co-founder of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, born on this day

“Befriending ourselves is the quiet revolution. It is learning to sit in the empty moments and find not exile, but home. To listen to the weeds of feeling- grief, anger, joy- as they push through the cracks, asking us to return to what is real. The body, like the earth, is always trying to rewild itself. Feelings rise like nettles and dandelions, insistent and alive, not to destroy us but to make us whole. And when we begin to trust our own company, the descent of autumn and winter is no longer something to fear. The pull inward becomes a homecoming. Silence becomes kinship. Darkness becomes a doorway.”

Brigit Anna McNeill

“At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for some one. She was getting on.”

From The Secret Garden, published 1911, by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849 – 1924), born on this day

“Sheltering God,
I hide myself in You.
Head swathed and bowed,
I listen for the still, small voice.

Strengthening God,
in times of tumult and terror,
as the earth moves
and the horizon shifts,
You call me back,
to shelter and to strengthen.

Your song is in the sighing of trees.
Your light is in flicker and spark,
knowing and unknowing.
Your power is in the greening,
and in its passing.

Those with ears to hear, listen.
Those with eyes to see, look.

War and peace,
trembling and tenderness,
all that we create
and all that we destroy
hold a holiness
we do not understand.

Illumine our being,
that our doing
might manifest You.”

Psalm 46 Redux by Carla Grosch-Miller

Feast Day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of music

“When we pay attention to nature’s music we find that every thing on earth contributes to its harmony. The trees joyously wave their branches in rhythm with the wind; the sound of the seas, the murmuring of the breeze, the whistling of the wind through the rocks, hills, and mountains, the flash of the lightning and the crash of the thunder, the harmony of sun and moon, the movements of the stars and planets, the blooming of the flower, the fading of the leaf, the regular alternation of morning, evening, noon, and night – all reveal to the seer the music of nature.

The insects have their concerts and ballets, and the choirs of birds chant in unison their hymns of praise.. foxes and wolves have their soirees musicales in the forest, while tigers and lions hold their operas in the wilderness. Music is the only means of understanding among birds and beasts. This may be seen by the gradation of pitch and volume of tone, the manner of tune, the number of repetitions, and the duration of their various sounds. These convey to their fellow creatures the time for joining the flock, the warning of coming danger, the declaration of war, the feeling of love, and the sense of sympathy, displeasure, passion, anger, fear, and jealousy – making a language of itself.”

From The Mysticism of Sound and Music by Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882 – 1927)

World Philosophy Day

“After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.”

Björk, born on this day in 1965

Universal Children’s Day

“Who knows how to bring up a changeling generation?
Wave upon wave, they come.
Our fear of magic is not theirs to answer for.
We had one job. We have one job.

Trick babies, changing faces, changing places
all along the way.
How will we know the chrysalis for the rest of their iridescent selfhood?
To recognize their true forms, we must unclutch rusty fingers
and let go, let go, let go.
Let them turn and try on all the jewels
Turn and see their shifting colors
Watch as they hold themselves up to the light
Turn, turn, turn – surprised by the beauty
By boundless possibility . . . !

We have one job.
To bring up a changeling child, you must pur love into an active volcano
Tossing food and care into the searing mouth
Sometimes falling in. And crawling out.
Falling and crawling again and again and again,
keeping faith in rich soil for future gardens.
You will not survive it on your own.
And we cannot survive without them.
The world has stolen nothing, has given us the children we need.
Earth more generous than we may deserve.
Protect these babies: furnace-forged
trickster children with sparks in their smiles,
chewing metal where we sucked stone.
What we called death, they call transformation
Where we saw fearful endings, they invite us, laughing, to begin.”

Changeling Generation, from Incantations for Rest by Atena O. Danner, Unitarian-Universalist minister

“The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of true religiousness.”

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955), theoretical physicist, quoted in Fragments of Holiness for Daily Reflection