Glory Song

Years ago, on an Indian reserve in northern Canada, I was helping a bishop's wife get the church sanctuary ready for the Sunday service. It was the middle of a typical winter with weeks and weeks of below zero weather stretching behind us and before us on the calendar.

"I wish we could use real flowers on the altar," the woman said as she arranged a selection of plastic mums and fake ivy, "but that is impossible this time of year."

"Do real flowers have a special significance?" I asked.

"Our denomination's tradition teaches that flowers are to give the last of their beauty to the glory of God," she said.

I remembered her words when we climbed a hillside this week in northern Arizona in the search of fall color.

We became uninvited stumblers into a concert of one when we entered an aspen cathedral the white pillars reaching skyward in a silent anthem of golden hues echoing in orange and brown

with each breeze a new dance of spiraling color decorated the paths we walked on as leaves decrescendoed earthward

the trees' last contribution of yearly beauty a forest symphony orchestrated for the eyes of God

but today for a brief measure of time the leaves spent their beauty for us

mere mortals, eavesdroppers on a glory song.