In the beginning, we are told there was Light—of some kind. One of my favorite things about TSCS, that I believe further separates us from others in really spending our school day well, is that we start the day with light.

We are often told to nourish mind, body, and soul, and our unique morning prayers outside in God’s lights accomplishes this fittingly. Our minds are invigorated by hearing the Word of God and experiencing the wisdom found in community singing, inspiring, and praying. Our souls also experience the vivifying life of God’s words, and we can choose this moment to spiritually interact with Spiritual light and be nourished. Our bodies, maybe, are most benefited by this morning blessing. Instead of artificial light, we receive the quickening light of the sun. Science has become quite clear that we, as a society, need a lot more sunlight—and from various spectra throughout the day—than we are absorbing if we want optimal mental, spiritual, and physical health and longevity. A day started without seeing and feeling the sun and the Son rise in and through us is ultimately an enfeebling and ebbing day.

It is a blessed thing that TSCS has seen the wisdom in cultivating all aspects of what we are, and knowing that each is part of a trinitarian community that enhances or impoverishes the other. Being outside in the natural world that our God created us to both take care of and by which to be taken care of, we can often be more nourished physically and quickened spiritually and joyfully alert mentally—which cyclically enhances each part ad infinitum.

There is something enlivening and intrinsic about having prayers outside. Sure, the weather can be sweltering, humid, frigid, uncomfortable, and unknown. But there is something about this unplanned, exacting, and mysterious realness that is enriching, beneficial for us, and needed—unpredictable and challenging things are often needful things!

We live in a world with too many comforts and controls. Sometimes, more than we realize and are told, we need to break free from the artificial environment that we have built around our minds, bodies, and souls; sometimes we need to be outside and commune with the real and see what God’s world has to say to us and do for us.

Thankfully, at Morning Prayers, instead of artificial walls that don’t speak beauty, we have trees, gardens and fields, diffused light, ephemeral clouds, and the interminable sky as our walls. These aesthetic necessaries shout and whisper beauty. Instead of a perfectly adjusted a/c that allows us to become fragile and desensitized, we do have some days of hugging humidity, wintry weather, drenches and drizzles, and sweltering sweat. It can be uncomfortable and unplanned, but those are good things in which the mind, body, and spirit should endure, embrace, and exult (these challenges give life to us instead of taking it—we are outside the ease of the Garden of Eden so that we can be challenged and refined and make it to the Heavenly Garden). And, finally, instead of artificial lights and mechanical air and its accompanying noises, we have those resplendent days when the Father’s voice reverberates out into the world, a bird hovers overhead or a rooster crows across the fields, a breeze lilts and rustles through the branches and into us, and the morning rays turn us higher up and higher into His creation.