Then is it true that you also need us?…
… Look: I am
giving it to you, this fragment; but how,
In your completeness, could you need it?
from ‘then is it true’, Helen Tookey
Spirit may not always bring my seeingdarkly into the light; sometimes Spirit encourages me to see even more darkly into the Mystery who is God.
This is part of the mystery:
I complete God.
This is just one of the paradoxes of the Incarnation, the fact of God-being-with-us. God’s presence in me seeks to join with God’s presence in other people, things and places. Spirit urges me to seek to know more of who God is, by knowing how God is with the person in front of me. In them I can come face to face with God.
Such a staggering thought! And it puts the casual, and less than careful, ways in which I treat some people into an awe-ful perspective. God’s incarnational Spirit in me, is what John O’Donohue calls a ‘deep strain of God’s caring’:
We carry in us a deep strain of God’s caring. Our love for our friends and family, our concern for the world and for the earth, our compassion for the pain and desperation of others are not simply the product of an “unselfish gene” within us, they issue from the strain of God in us that prizes above everything else the kindness, the compassion, and the beauty that love brings. Anywhere: in prayer, family, front line, brothel or prison, anywhere care comes alive, God is present.
care & accumulated certainty
‘Anywhere … God is present’: God’s Spirit is not a fixed thing or quantity. Another mind-bending realisation of the implication of God-with-us meaning God-in-me-now, is that God invites us to complete God by participating in the continual making of the universe – which is already completely God. I am called to be a co-creator with God. God is a generative God. God’s whole just increases as I co-create with Spirit, because God is infinite abundance. I help complete God’s whole at the very moment that God’s whole increases! This is what Abraham Joshua Heschel refers to (below) as ‘the outgrowth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ebbing presence of the divine’.
This ‘outgrowth’ means all that ever has been, remains enmeshed as part of the expanding whole. That includes all my losses, my griefs, my lostness, my broken relationships. They are wholed – healed. How? Like this:
I continue to whole God, through co-creating more of God into being-with-us, by communing with God’s Spirit ever-present in me.
Our awareness of God is a syntax of the silence in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us.
It is the afterglow of years in which soul and sky are silent together, the outgrowth of accumulated certainty of the abundant, never-ebbing presence of the divine.
All we ought to do is let the insight be and to listen to the soul’s recessed certainty of its being a parentheses in the immense script of God’s eternal speech.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
ineffable syntax of silence. (iPhone image)
image into ikon 