Divinity in a Speck of Dust (Part 1)
From Episode 4 of the Astonishing Secret Videos
This episode offers many examples, once again, of what we could call ‘the sacramental vision’. That’s one word for this while incarnational approach. Or the ‘Catholic imagination’ is another old name for what we are doing in this course. They are all ways of interpreting the incarnation. So one little story may help us again to again to get the feel for what we are doing when we are reflecting on all these matters, these supremely important measures.
The story is about the violinist Yehudi Menhuin. He had a music school in Paris for young promising musicians and one day he was walking down the corridor at lunchtime and he found this little lad having his lunch having. So he said,
What are you eating?’
And the little fellow said, ‘Bread sir.’
Menhuin said, ‘Bread? It doesn’t look like bread. Where did you get it?’
The little chap said, ‘Oh me Ma baked it and sent it to me.’
Yehudi Menuhin walked away and was meditating and apparently his meditation went something like this. He was thinking of the boy’s Irish mother in the West of Ireland, say in Westport and looking out over the Atlantic Ocean. And as she is there in the kitchen, she’s the bread on the table and thinking all the time of her son, Liam 13/14 years of, age away from home for the first time, eldest of a large family. She was missing him like mad and loving him so much, her heart was beating the blood to her arms and her arms into her fingers as she was baking the bread. Kneading the dough, pouring love from her aim into to the bread from her fingers, missing him and thinking of him. Then finishing the baking, wrapping it, posting it the receiving it. Liam receiving it, opening it, slicing it and then eating it.
Menhuin was so taken by that story – it is a whole sacramental story of course, linked to the Eucharist I suppose. But it made an impression on him, just looking at something very ordinary and seeing the depth of love init. I suppose for all of us to be able to do that kind of thing, it seems important that we would be able to see the love of God in our own hearts first and then it will flow out and be caught by other people.
Let’s have a look at Pope Francis words again,
‘Incarnation means that every person has been taken up into the very heart of God conferring on them an infinite divinity.’
Any of these phrases we are using from the Pope are enough to open the gates, to open the door of our hearts and imagination and to get the whole point that I think Incarnation is meant to offer. At this stage I would just like to mention something that Catholic Church in the West seems to have forgotten. It is the whole process of Divinisation and Deification. They are big words but what they mean is that, from birth to death, our life is meant to be a process of being divinised, made like God. The Eastern Church believe it and they still practise it. We have somehow forgotten it to our own detriment I do think. It’s a beautiful concept. It is very linked with incarnation.
‘Let us make humans in our own image and likeness.’ We read that in the book of Genesis It’s almost as if we are born in God’s image and as we grow, we colour it is so to speak. We flesh it into us until finally we are where God is all in all.
Then we can see that the Word became flesh to make us partakers in the Divine nature. Even in the catechism we read
‘The Word became flesh to make us partakers of the divine nature. For the Son ofGod became human so that we might become God.’
That is such powerful language and it is in the current, Catholic Catechism. But many, many people have said that and one of the first, after Jesus was St Iranaeus who said that,
‘God became human so that Humans could become God.’
Now that’s the whole background and texture and substance of what we’re saying in all of these episodes, to help us to and to grasp and to interiorise the whole notion that we have called to be divinised day by day, destined with the whole world for heaven.
(An Astonishing Secret Video Course, Episode 4, start to 7.18 minutes)