Saturday, April 23, 2016

Woman, planet Earth, and the Other, shining like the sun

How I now see things:

     Myself—woman, human being, plant Earth

     God—the Other, incomprehensible, in everything, everywhere

As I child I saw God as an old man with a long, white beard, stern, condemning, impossible to please, voice like thunder, distant.

Over time, as my relationship with God has deepened and evolved, my understanding of Him* has evolved, become far less concrete, yet far more present. I will never understand what God is on this side of eternity. I don’t stay awake nights pondering the nature of the Divine. What’s the point?—it is not to be comprehended; it is beyond the grasp of human intelligence. As I gradually cede the need to understand and visualize Him, it has become easier to sink into feeling God’s presence. God in all the spaces between molecules, in the air I breathe, inside of me and the primary essence of my soul and the soul of every living creature.

It is that presence that we share that Thomas Merton saw in 1958 on a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky. He wrote this description in his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
You are shining like the sun, I am shining like the sun, we all are shining like the sun because God is present in us all.


*Please don’t be snarled up in my use of the word Him to refer to God. I use the masculine pronouns just for simplicity sake. I don’t see Him as an old white guy—that’s just the Children’s Bible version of God.

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