Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

The son of a Presbyterian minister and biblical scholar, Robinson Jeffers was a Northern Californian poet who died in 1962. At the height of his fame, Time Magazine featured him on their cover. He was invited to read from his works at the Library of Congress, and his image was even made into a U.S. postage stamp.

You have set your glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

His poetry revealed a preference for the natural world over what he saw as the negative influence of civilization. He even coined the phrase “inhumanism,” holding to the thought that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things."

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

The National Endowment For The Arts claims that Robinson Jeffers questioned the uniqueness of humankind.

“As extraordinary as humans might be, from his perspective they are not qualitatively superior to other beings, they are not essential to the universe, and they are not the special concern of a man-like God.”

You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.

How did this play out in his poetry. The poem HURT HAWK includes the controversial line “I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.”

You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

In his collection of poems titled A BOOK OF LUMINOUS THINGS, Czeslaw Milosz says that Jeffers felt that the human species was a “destructive plasm on the surface of the globe,” and that in time mankind would exit this planet, when everything would “once again be perfectly beautiful.

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! Psalm 8

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it." Genesis 28:16

Most of us won't get a "wake up" dream like Jacob got. When he woke up his whole world had changed. Even though this is our Father's world, we can view it flatly, in mono, black and white instead of color, lacking the lacking the heightened wonder that HD brings. This is a gift the Spirit brings.

William Blake the poet/illustrator noted that our tendency is to see only "with" the eye, when the possibility exists to see "through" the eye, beyone to the deeper truth that lays just beneath the surface of a thing. And C. S. Lewis picked up on this theme as well, in a poem he titled A CONFESSION.

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening–any evening–would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain on a cocktail-shaker’s nose;
Waterfalls don’t remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I’ve never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone–
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops’ brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.

Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d’estaminet.
I’m like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things…peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.

In humbly denigrating his ability as a poet, Lewis begins with the least important things - peacocks strutting, and climaxes with the most important,  with Jerusalem and all that lies behind it.

This is calculated by Lewis in order to express his desire to see beyond a mere city of stone, and instead to see through it, comprehending the spiritual and eternal significance hidden there, hoping in so doing, to better come to understand the heart of God.

What better thing could we ask of God in 2011, that he might grant us eyes to not just see with, but through - to the ultimate realities - to God himself, and his plan in history that continuously unfolds.