Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you’re looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, Lord.
from The Colour Purple
Alice Walker
The fifth morning after an encounter that might change my life, if I let it.
If I let myself believe the source of that light was an angel…
if I left myself believe that I heard words…
if I let myself believe than an actual angel would want to bother having words with an ordinary me…
what if I have no idea how to be holy enough? (for what? my heart whispers)…
what if I struggle to believe I could be a vessel with God inside me?…
what if I have barely nodding acquaintance with this thing called God anyway?
How can I possibly catch at the wonder that God is within as well as without? Can I look on God with the mind of a child? Dare I look at God with the mind of a lover?
I reflect for a moment on God’s presence around me and in me.
Creator of the universe, the sun and the moon, the earth,
every molecule, every atom, everything that is:
God is in every beat of my heart. God is with me, now.
(presence prayer from Sacred Space)
O, let me not always feel I am just on the outside of God trying to look in.
God cannot be thought, but God can be met. Through awe and wonder we experience God and there, as mystics have always stated, we understand more by not understanding than by understanding. In that posture we let God be God. In such a posture, too, we live in contemplation.
from The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 117
Ronald Rolheiser
outside looking in. iPhone image.
image into ikon 