It’s hard not to be a little bit inspired if you’ve ever seen this scene from “Dead Poets Society.”
It’s now engraved on coffee mugs, plastered on posters, emblazoned on t-shirts. Carpe diem! Seize the day! Take it, Henry David Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…” Countless women and men shout “Amen!” to all these sentiments.
But this devotion is not about marrow sucking or day seizing. Though I have been inspired by these adages over the years, I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older that carpe diem can be rather exhausting. It’s hard to keep up that pace! Instead, a different Latin phrase has been my faith mantra recently (and apologies to the Latin linguists out there if this isn’t quite accurate): Sume diem. Receive the day.
I think this might be more theologically appropriate, too. I get seizing the day. You want to grab hold of opportunities while they’re in front of you. But carpe diem can be a slippery slope because you may be so focused on seizing the day that you forget the One who created the day in the first place. For me, receiving the day reminds me that Someone else is doing the moving and shaking first. That would be God. Each day, I am given a certain number of hours, meetings, interactions, observations. If I believe that God is the creator of the world, I first must have the prayerful attitude of receiving these gifts. Once I do, then (hopefully) I’m inspired to act with lovingkindness and, yes, maybe even seize an opportunity or two. But first I must open my heart and hands and acknowledge (and praise!) a God who gives first and who gives generously. Sume diem, indeed.
(Oh, and the photo above–which didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped–was taken at 6:15 a.m. last summer at our campsite at Rocky Mountain National Park).