Well – I’m back from an absolutely fantastic weekend camping with youth, young adults and others. What a great and EXHAUSTING time!!!! I got to watch my six-year-old son do three front flips off of a sand cliff. I watched my eldest son hang with his proto-teenage friends in all their glory and watched as my six-year-old daughter idolized the teen girls all weekend. What fun.

Sunday morning we had a nice little service in the field adjacent to our campsite facing the rising sun and surrounded on all sides by pine, poplar and brich trees. The theme of the service was Doxa which is variously translated as belief or glory. Of course they didn’t explicitly know this. It’s not like I opened the service with the words “today’s theme is DOXA” because I would have lost most of my youth right there.

As belief you see doxa appear in words such as Orthodoxy aka “right or correct belief.” As glory you see doxa appear in words such as doxology aka “words about glory or glory words.” The sense I was speaking of was glory. We faced the warmth of the sun and opened in prayer thanking God for the reminders of His presence in creation and then I read Psalm 19 which does a great job speaking of God’s glory in creation. After that a short intro to the Doxology which we then sang as a closing prayer.

In Roman Catholic circles the Gloria Patri serves as a doxology and it would serve the rest of us just fine as well:

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.

Translated from Latin to English:

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and always, to the ages of ages. Amen.

The following is more commonly used by Protestants and was written by Anglican Priest Thomas Ken in 1674.

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Praise God from whom all blessings flow

Praise Him all creatures here below

Praise Him above you heavenly host

Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost

Amen

All in all the weekend was, in a word, “glorious.”