‘God is in every Heartbeat, every Speck of Dust’ (Pope Francis)
Close mutual presence or ultimate intimacy with the Mystery called God is the final goal of the spiritual journey. This journey of longing for union is followed along two paths – the path of inward mindfulness and awareness, and the path of outward seeing and recognising.
‘God became human so that humans could become God. You could say that Creation itself and all its evolutionary wonders and potential first emerged, in the Big Bang, from the womb of our Divine Mother; and then, in the way of wonder beyond all understanding, that same Mother-God, when the time was right, chose a human being, a human mother, to gestate, in a human womb, the human being who would be called ‘God – The Human One’. Divinity and humanity perfectly equal and honoured. So now we know what the invisible divine Mystery of Life and Love looks like in human form – in the totally human Jesus; and we also know what the fully human being, in the eyes of the Creator, looks like – in the very same divine Jesus. Creation and Incarnation you could say, are two moments and two phases of the one process of God’s self-giving, self-expression, and divinising of all creatures. God became human so that humans could become God.’
Billions of years ago an invisible dot of nothingness exploded into everything that is – the infinite cosmos of each tiny heart, the eternal heart of each expanding cosmos. And we somehow knew it was the unfolding of a love-story. We sensed that the Big Bang was the sound of love, and that creation, once molten rock, would one day sing operas.
On planet earth, 14 billion years later, another invisible dot of love exploded in a human womb to create and develop a new order of that one being, of that one living love-story.
It was the same dot – first the kiss of God to nothingness to impregnate it with a divine creation; then the kiss of two evolved human beings to create a unique divine-human creature. And in the sheer beauty, love and meaning of that astonishing revelation we no longer doubted. Now we knew for sure that our first hunch was right. Creation was the first Incarnation, the first Bible. We also began to understand that we ourselves, now, actually are the evolving, incarnate, invincible, visceral embodiment of the love-energy of God, a love-energy that is dedicated, from the very beginning, to grow this earth into heaven! And this sublime, distorted, twisted, ineffable, terrible love-story is only beginning. And we are that love-story.
(From an unpublished work by Daniel O’Leary)