Cat Stevens & Morning Has Broken

 

1 Morning has broken like the first morning,

blackbird has spoken like the first bird.

Praise for the singing! Praise for the morning!

Praise for them, springing fresh from the Word!

2 Sweet the rain's new fall sunlit from heaven,

like the first dewfall on the first grass.

Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,

sprung in completeness where God's feet pass.

3 Ours is the sunlight! Ours is the morning

born of the one light Eden saw play!

Praise with elation, praise every morning,

God's recreation of the new day!

                                                       Voices United 409

In the early 1970s Cat Stevens was the folk/pop/rock dream guy. With dark and unruly hair and beard he churned out hits including Wild World and Peace Train and Moonshadow --I can hear you humming them!

 Perhaps the most improbable of his popular songs was a cover of a hymn with lyrics written in 1931, set to an even older Gaelic tune. Morning has Broken is in many hymn books and over the years folk in different congregations were surprised that we were singing a pop song,  assuming Cat Stevens wrote it. 

                                              

                                                                       Rick Wakeman 1970s

I discovered recently that the jaunty keyboard intro to Steven's version was created by Rick Wakeman of the prog rock band Yes. Steven's heard him noodling before the recording session for the hymn and liked the tempo and feel of his playing so asked him to do the intro in that style. When you listen there is a sense that the ear-catching first bars settle into the hymn in a more familiar way, with Cat's guitar as accompaniment. 

It's interesting that while this is a Christian hymn, reflecting Stevens' spiritual quest, he eventually embraced the Islamic religion and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. He all but gave up musical performance and song-writing for a couple of decades. Eventually he realized that musical expression was not forbidden in Islam and now performs and records under the name Yusuf. 

Fifty years after the the 1970 release of Tea for the Tillerman, in September 2020, Stevens remade the album as  Tea for the Tillerman2. This version includes new lyrics and new instrumentation, and he sings along with his 22-year-old self in Father and Son. We received this second version as a gift and quite enjoyed the changes. 

The Solstice and Celebrating Creation

 

                                                                 Killbear Provincial Park

All things bright and beautiful,

all creatures great and small,

all things wise and wonderful:

in love, God made them all.

1 Each little flower that opens,

each little bird that sings,

God made their glowing colours,

God made their tiny wings.  R

2 The purpleheaded mountains,

the river running by,

the sunset and the morning

that brightens up the sky;  R

On this Summer Solstice our daughter Emily and husband Brad are camping in beautiful Killbear Provincial Park on Georgian Bay. It is a place of memories for Brad's family and where he proposed to Emily. They are urban people with a trendy part of downtown Toronto as their current habitat but both of them spent lots of time in the outdoors as they grew up and still love the natural world.  

                                                      Killbear photos June 21 2026 -- Emily Hendriks

They were also raised in Christian families which attended church but that's not part of the rhythm of their lives at this point, Yet they have noted that there is a sense of the sacred in this place and that they have spontaneously sung a couple of hymns while they're rambling about, a somewhat surprising admission.  In a text exchange Emily commented that the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful was bumping through her head yesterday. It sounds perfect for the location. 

Perhaps our favourite Solstice Day ever was on Haida Gwaii a couple of years ago. We celebrated the astonishing natural abundance of this island archipelago off the BC coast on what is also National Indigenous Peoples Day. It couldn't have been a better setting. 

Wherever we are today we can give thanks to the Creator and celebrate the gifts of Creation. 

3 The cold wind in the winter,

the pleasant summer sun,

the ripe fruits in the garden:

God made them every one.  R

4 The rocky mountain splendour,

the lone wolf's haunting call,

the great lakes and the prairies,

the forest in the fall;  R

5 God gave us eyes to see them,

and lips that we might tell

how great is God our maker,

who has made all things well.  R

Refugia for Butterflies

                                                        Yellow Swallowtail

"The private garden has become the last viable habitat for many butterfly species in developed regions of the United States. A functional house — with correct slot geometry, a puddling station, and untreated wood — can mean the difference between local extinction and a stable population. The problem is not people's willingness. The problem is that most commercially available butterfly houses simply do not meet the basic biological requirements."

Dr. Patricia Nguyen Entomologist, UNC Asheville — Dept of Biology & Environmental Studies

 Nearly 20 years ago I stepped away from congregational ministry for a few months to recalibrate and renew.  I spent about half the time in an old farmhouse on Ragged Chutes Road in the back of beyond. The sprawling farm was at the end of the gravel road and I was alone during the week with Ruth joining me on Thursdays evenings after work, then driving back early on  Monday mornings. During the week it was just me and the critters, the deer and bears and coyotes. There were also birds and dragonflies and butterflies aplenty. I called this spot Refugio, a Spanish word meaning shelter used to describe the hostels on the Camino pilgrimage. The farm was a safe and healing place amidst the big pines and maples. 

I came across the word in it's plural form recently in the title of an article in Nature magazine about the decline of butterflies in North America: More than 70% of Americans live in areas with no natural refugia for butterflies. The private backyard may be the last one left.

Butterflies are not decorative. Where they disappear, the birds that feed on their caterpillars disappear. The wildflowers that depend on them for pollination stop reproducing. The decline is not an aesthetic loss — it's a collapse signal. And the signal has been flashing red for years.

The article is also about Dot Calloway, a woman who crafts butterfly refuges for backyards, something I'd never heard of before. They are essentially butterfly hostels with carefully calibrated slots where the butterflies can tuck themselves away from predators as well as providing a source of water with a perch. To me they look like little chapels. What a wonderful vocation, a practical commitment to Creation. She writes a letter to every buyer. Sadly, Dot is closing her workshop after more than 30 years. 

In our backyard we see monarchs and swallowtails and viceroys and others. We are we are always pleased to observe them at a couple of bushes adjacent to our deck with blossoms that attract them. I suppose it's very nerdy to get excited about a yellow swallowtail but I'm happy to confess that for me it's a sacred encounter. 

Dorothy "Dot" Callaway (75) in her workshop in Weaverville, NC. Thirty-two winters, more than 3,000 houses — and now the last collection.

https://craft-folk.com/pages/dots-butterfly-house?gad_campaignid=23758989514&wbraid=ClMKCAjwrs7RBhAlEkMA0iCF2XNz_KmwAoCAYzEN_MJH86DkYdVDqEe3ALAPVu2_DQPaziiontPRHztcK0HSn-24ZxXbBQ__5FoSm70FSM_9GgJgUg&shem=rimspwouohe,

Juneteenth, Hush Arbors & Black Ecotheology

                                                                  Hush Arbor Worship Service 

 Happy Birthday to our wonderful son, Isaac, and to Wordle -- definitely in that order.

This is also Juneteenth, a federal holiday in the United States to commemorate the end of slavery following the Civil War. The enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation happened last in Texas on June 19, 1865 and by the 1890s Juneteenth was used to acknowledge this auspicious date.

On  this Juneteenth I'm pondering all those people who were enslaved by supposedly Christian supremacists yet continued to worship the God of liberation and hope. And I'm particularly mindful of those who chose to join together for worship away from their enslavers in secluded outdoor settings termed "hush harbors" or "hush arbors". A harbour is a safe haven and an arbour is a wooded area so both make sense. These meeting allowed Black identity to flourish away from white missionaries and slave masters who used religion to enforce submission. 

I wonder if theses "invisible churches" were part of the foundation for Black eco-theology which is now receiving scholarly attention. I mentioned last year that I read the eye-opening Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People. Author Tiya Miles posits that Tubman, a courageous liberator of enslaved persons "is arguably the most famous Black ecologist in US history" because of her broad knowledge of woods and waterways on the secretive path to freedom.

Miles quotes scholar Dianne Glave who notes that African Americans have long envisioned the environment in luminous and evocative, capricious and perilous ways.

Happy Juneteenth to all those who seek the depth and breadth of this day in all aspects, including Black eco-theology. 

Creating an Ethical Will?

I came upon a passing reference to a legacy document in certain expressions of Judaism termed an "ethical will." The term intrigued me so I did some searching and found this in my Jewish Learning:

For centuries, Jewish parents have passed down wisdom and values to their children by crafting end-of-life documents called tzava’ot or “ethical wills.” Much as a legal will enables one to dole out assets and possessions to one’s heirs, an ethical will gives the writer an opportunity to share their wealth of wisdom: lessons they’ve learned over a lifetime, where they found meaning in their lives, and what they may want for their loved ones going forward.

Traditionally, Jewish ethical wills contained a number of items, including burial instructions, debts and obligations to be paid, requests that family members carry on specific religious traditions, and blessings over the family. But modern ethical wills are less about accounting and instruction and more about imparting wisdom or wishes or simply reviewing one’s life. They are often written in the form of a letter and addressed to one’s children, but they can take many forms. There is no halachic (Jewish law) template or script they must follow.

In the Middle Ages, ethical wills were shared privately among families. One of the most famous ethical wills from this time was written by Spanish Jewish physician and scholar Judah ibn Tibbon to his son, Samuel when he died in France in the 12th century. It ran over 50 pages long and covered a wide range of topics, from the importance of books — he wrote the familiar line “let books be your companions; let bookcases and shelves be your pleasure grounds and gardens” — to a harsh rebuke of his son whom he felt wasn’t living up to his expectations.

 Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Israel holds a number of ethical wills hastily written by Jews before they were killed at the hands of the Nazis. 

I hadn't heard about ethical wills before but the notion grabbed me. We have three adult children with partners as well as four grandchildren so during the pandemic we updated our will from decades ago, doing everything online. We were relieved to have attended to this legal housekeeping but it never occurred to us that we might create a complementary will conveying wisdom and values.

I'm pleased that all of them have adopted our love as nature, so this is already part of our legacy. We have encouraged Christian faith with the components of generosity and compassion and we see this to varying degrees in each household. We brought our children up to be respectful and welcoming to what we then called gays and lesbians. All of them have LGBTQ2S friends and are open in ways we couldn't have imagined when we were young. 

What would any of us include in our version of the tzava'ot or ethical will? I want to give this a lot more thought in the days ahead, because the clock is ticking! 

On Eagle's Wings at 50

 

Author, composer and professor Fr. Michael Joncas holding a June 2024 letter from former U.S. president Joe Biden by the bookcase where he framed and displayed the original 1976 score of "On Eagle's Wings," in his apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 2026. (NCR photo/Camillo Barone)

In 1976  Jan Michael Joncas, a 24-year-old who had temporarily stepped away from a vocation to the priesthood wrote a hymn for a friend whose father had just died. It was sung at the funeral mass and quickly gained popularity that spread broadly over the past half century. The hymn, On Eagle's Wings, has been sung as an anthem and hymn in many churches, Protestant and Roman Catholic, in times of sorrow and joy. 

In Voices United, a United Church hymn resource, On Eagle's Wings is number 808, in the psalm section because it is based on Psalm 91, a source of comfort for Joncas when saying the daily office. He is still alive although serious health issues have left him unable to sing the way he once did or to play the guitar. 

The original 1976 score of "On Eagle's Wings" by Fr. Michael Joncas, framed and displayed on his bookcase in his apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 2026. (NCR photo/Camillo Barone)

I read about Joncas in the National Catholic Register and here are a few paragraphs from the article" 

"I pray that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven," Joncas said with a faint smile and watery eyes. "I just keep hoping that more and more we will respond to the spirit of God and have a transformation of our world."

Looking back, he says the most surreal moment for "On Eagle's Wings" may have been Nov. 7, 2020. While he was watching television, Joncas heard Biden quote the hymn during his victory speech. Later, Joncas wrote the president elect a letter explaining the song's origins.

"I have carried your words in my heart for decades and sung them at more Masses than I can remember," Biden wrote back. "When I meet families and communities who have experienced deep loss — from natural disasters, violence, and other circumstances out of their control — I often share your words with them as a blessing, with the hope that they will be comforted by them, as I have always been."

Imagine, a considerate and compassionate president!

The Face & a "Glass Darkly"

 

 For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.  And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

                                           1 Corinthians 13: 12-13 NRSV, KJV

Ten days ago I listened to a fascinating interview on CBC Radio Sunday Morning with Fay Bound Alberti on our millennia old preoccupation with the human face. The podcast teaser describes the conversation this way: 

Selfies, social media and facial recognition have made us hyper aware – and hyper critical – of our own faces. But Fay Bound-Alberti says these innovations are just the latest examples of technology re-shaping our relationship with our faces. The historian and founder of King’s College London's Centre for Technology and the Body joins Piya Chattopadhyay to chart how mirrors and portraiture gave way to modern phenomena like "Zoom dysmorphia" and "looksmaxxing".

If you have any awareness of social media you'll be aware of the myriad "influencers" who set crazy expectations for personal appearance, particularly the face. Many of them are women although lots of men are involved in the online preening. As Bound Alberti reminded us, AI and filters and cosmetic surgery are employed to create the perfect image. 

I have noticed over time that there are many untimely deaths amongst these influencers, sometimes from surgery gone wrong or drug overdoses. It also seems that some of them die by their own hands at young ages, perhaps overwhelmed by the impossible standards they have set and can no longer maintain. At the gym there has been a growing presence of teens whose workouts include a lot of checking out their physiques in the mirror-lined walls. 

As I venture deeper into the "face like 50 miles of bad road" phase of life I am certainly aware that looks are fleeting. 

I think too of the passage of scripture from 1 Corinthians called the Love Passage so often included in Christian marriage ceremonies. As the wedding party would stand before me, often having spent a fortune on makeup, we would hear about the deeper qualities of love and the truth that we only have a partial image of life's meaning now with the implication that the day will come when we are fully understood, truly seen, by God's mercy. 

Decades ago I saw ancient mirrors in the Israel Museum which would have been possessions of the wealthy. Even still, they were made of polished metal and lighting would have poor by our standards so the reflected images which were far from perfect. 

It turns out that Faye Bound Alberti lives with prosopagnosia, or face blindness. When host Piya Chattopadhyay asked her what she would leave listeners with she suggested that we need to be kind to ourselves. Good advice. 

 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

                                      I Corinthians 13: 4-7 NRSVue

                                                Mirrors in the Israel Museum