Day Clean

Awake, my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake the dawn.

- Psalm 57.8, 108.2

The Gullah are an African-American people group who inhabit the Lowlands of Georgia and South Carolina, both on the shores and the coastal islands. They have their own language, a Creole molded on English with significant West and Central African influences. It even has its own vocabulary. For instance, the Gullah word for dawn is "day clean."

I love that! "Day clean" - those wispy tendrils of time when twenty-four virgin hours lie unlived before us.  Each night when we close our eyes in sleep we shake the Etch-a-Sketch of our incomplete autobiographies. In the morning we marvel at the clean screen as we receive a new day. Blew the diet yesterday? Try again. Fell into old patterns of sin and self? This morning, so far so good. To-Do list became a To Didn't indictment? Get a running start. 

The psalmists anticipated the Gullah concept of "day clean." Twice in the hymnal of Sacred Scripture the inspired poets declare their intention to start the day before the day starts in on them. They harnessed the morning's first moments to the praise and worship of the Almighty. They pledged to recalibrate their circadian rhythms by the compass of the Divine. If dawn finds me on my knees, there is a better chance that sundown will find me still on my feet.

Perhaps that is why Mark 1 records that Jesus, after his inaugural ministry in the synagogue of Capernaum, rising up a great while before day, went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed (v.35). In Spanish, muy de manana; in Gullah, "at day clean." 

Carpe diem is a lovely sentiment, but trying to seize the day after it's already begun unraveling is like trying to saddle a rodeo bronc after the gate has opened and it's begun bucking across the arena. Better to seize the sunrise, to catch dawn napping, to contemplate the clean day before life clutters it up. As Thomas a Kempis prayed, "Grant me now, this very day, to begin perfectly, for thus far I have done nothing."