Backpacking through Wyoming's Wind River Range a few weeks ago, I reveled constantly in the sublimity of the beauty around me, the vast valleys, verdant carpets of untrammeled rivers and wild and snow bordered lakes, the lofty tundra and rock strewn passes, the magnificent sculpted peaks, and, most of all, perhaps, the dawns, those magical times when the earth seemed so still and silent, mountains and water shrouded in crisp air and fading darkness, the sun hinting at its imminent presence behind the peaks, the entire creation seemingly poised to erupt, to emerge, glorious and free, from the long hours of night, fresh, renewed, ready to ignite the imagination once more, a new day come.
     Over and over again, as I trod through those lilting mornings, I thought of the final lines of the first verse of the ancient Gaelic hymn, Morning has Broken, " . . . praise for the singing, praise for the morning, praise for them [created things] springing, fresh from the Word."  I at the mystery, the ineffable mystery of creation:  physicality sprung from nothing more (but, significantly, nothing less) than the word of God.  Not physicality from abolutely nothing, for that would be philosophically impossible, but physicality from something greater than nothing, something that envelopes and supersedes nothing, but something we cannot see, something so remarkable that it, in itself, generates substance, identity, and form, the source of all origination in the universe.
     Without an ultimacy, and without a word to communicate that ultimacy, creation would not be.  Nothing can be, nothing can exist apart from something, yet only a something that in itself is "somethingness" could birth something, something that is, in this instance, a cosmos.  Morning in the Wind River Range, morning splashing about the majesty and wonder of its peaks is a morning that, apart from an originative Word, would never come.  The creator God exists, constantly, eternally, his Word forever communicating, through the beauty of the planet, the fact, force, and power of his existence, the eternal Word from which all things inevitably must spring.