Dear Good Samaritans,

There is a really lovely instinct in the prophets and psalmist. When they ran out of plain words for God, they started looking around themselves at things they could see and understand. God is a potter. God is a shepherd. God is a rock, a fortress, a refuge, a nursing mother who will not forget her child. These poets knew what we sometimes forget—that the truest things about God cannot be said straight on. We have to come at them sideways, in images, metaphor, and similes.

This Sunday we continue our journey through the many ways to talk about God with the hymn God the Sculptor of the Mountains.

Listen to how the first verse moves: God the sculptor of the mountains, God the miller of the sand, God the jeweler of the heavens, God the potter of the land. Four trades in four lines—sculptor, miller, jeweler, potter—and behind each one a different scale of God’s attention. Just imagine it. The sculptor shapes something vast; the miller grinds something to almost nothing; the jeweler attends to what is precious and small; the potter works the humble earth. Our God is at work in the mountain and in the grain of sand, in the stars and in the clay, and the hymn helps us to imagine all of them.

Then comes the turn I love most. After all that craft and labor, the verse says: you are womb of all creation, we are formless; shape us now. The maker becomes a mother. The one who sculpts and mills and shapes is also the one who carries and bears. And we, for our part, are not the finished masterpiece. We are all works in progress. We are the we are the formless clay, still being made. There is great mercy in that confession. We do not have to have it all together. We only have to be willing to be shaped.

Each verse follows this same beautiful pattern, and each ends with a small, honest prayer of our need:

We are formless; shape us now.
We are sightless; lead us now.
We are searching; meet us now.

The hymn names what God does, and then it names what we lack—and trusts that the two belong together. This is the rhythm of all real prayer: God’s abundance meeting our emptiness, not to shame it, but to fill it.

Peace,