Echoes of Intimacy and the Infinity of Now

Echoes of Intimacy

The Risen Christ told St Theresa that he needed her eyes to look with love on people and places. ‘The real aim’, wrote Simone Weil, ‘is not to see God in all things; it is that God, through us, should see the things that we can see.’ And touch the things that we can touch. And hear the things that we can hear. The theological giant Karl Barth, somewhat infatuated with the music of Mozart, surmised that when the horn concerto is on at full swell, ‘then our dear Lord listens with special pleasure’. And do we dismiss too soon the stories of children playing their drums for God, or squeezing God in next to them for a ride or a chat in their new, red and shiny fire-engines? After all. God is sheer joy,’ wrote St. Thomas Aquinas,when asked why God made the world, ‘and sheer joy needs company.’

In Sheep Fair Kerry Hardy writes:

I took God with me to the sheep fair. I said, ‘Look

there’s Liv, sitting on the wall waiting;

these are the pens, these are the sheep,

this is their shit we are walking in, this is their fear.’

Then I let God sip tea, boiling hot, from a cup,

And I lent God my fingers to feel how they burned

When I tripped on a stone and it slopped.

‘This is hurt,’ I said, ‘there’ll be more.’

Such an awareness makes the familiar delightfully unfamiliar again. The senses become thresholds to the Mystery, revealing an astonishing immediacy and intimacy with the universe and its Creator. You find yourself dong things you haven’t done since you were a child – chatting to God as you walk or drive along, pointing out this and that, as you round each new bend in the road. You re-enter, in a completely new way, the childhood of play and wonder you once lived – but left too soon

From Already Within, Divining the Hidden Spring, p109

 The Infinity of Now

When I go to Ireland I’m always struck by the Angelus broadcast on television. It is a valiant effort to recover a kind of timing and fine-tuning of the way we are present to whatever we are doing at that moment. At twelve and at six, the bells are tolled. During the pealing, workers from a variety of  professions are depicted as lifting their heads and pausing for the length of a few breaths. They have moved, for a moment, inside themselves, drawn to a horizon deep within their own soul. It does not seem to be so much a distraction as a way of living more fully in the present moment, of being more present and developed to the immediate work of their hands and eyes. . .

There is a story that I love which illustrates the grace of this awareness. Two men were building a wall – long and high, one at each end. When asked what he was doing, the first brickie replied that, for a start, he had no interest whatever in his work. A wall is a wall is a wall. He was bored and listless. Brcik after brick, day after day, month after month. He longed for Fridays; he hated Mondays. With no interest or involvement, his work was slowly killing him.

‘I’m creating a cathedral’, murmured the other man. ‘This is the South Wall of it. I’ve seen the plans. It will be such a beautiful building. I can’t believe I’m part of it. When I watch the young children playing around here, I can see them and their own children worshipping in this holy and lovely place for the decades of their lives.’

When talking to parents, teachers and priests, I often tell this story. It transforms the way we see things. It is what the Incarnation has revealed. It is what the sacraments are for. It is why God created the world – so that one day we would tumble to the amazing reality that lies beneath what we too often term as ‘ordinary’. That is why the story of the two workman is called ‘The Infinite Horizon’. There is an infinite horizon to every single, routine, menial task we perform. The heavens reverberate to the least of our whispers or acts of love.’

From Already Within, Divining the Hidden Spring, pp 89,90