The Dearest Freshness

The poets and artists are never tired of playing with this fascinating theme. Unlike many of the official teachers of religion, they have never lost the sense of wonder at the mystery of the indwelling of God in creation. For them, the smallest particle of creation becomes a window on God’s beauty. Their intense energy is spent on revealing ‘the dearest freshness that lives deep down things’. They see ‘his blood upon the rose and in the stars the glory of his eyes’.  Like ‘flaming from shook foil”, God’s splendour radiates from all creatures for those who stay blessed with the original vision of childhood. The artist and the mystic use images and symbols to catch the firefly glimpses of the extraordinary presence of a spirit of wonder beneath the seemingly superficial and ordinary. Once we become sensitive to the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, then everything has changed. We see the world differently. We finally get the message. The human holds the key to God. ‘Salvation’ as the Church father said, ‘hinges on the flesh’. All things are made new. From now on, our vision and our focus will be trained on discovering the God of surprises hiding and playing at the heart of life. . . .

God is so intimately one with the world. We are not healed from the outside in. Grace is not something on top of, or part of, or added to nature. Unbelievably, what we keep forgetting, or denying, or failing to understand is that matter itself is intrinsically sacred from the beginning. Because of the revelation that happened at the incarnation, we can now be certain that the kingdom of God is within, that the Holy Spirit is at work and play in our inmost being, that we look for God not out there anymore, but waiting to be discovered in our deepest self.

Even a partial awareness of this unbelievable mystery of divine surrender to our hearts brings a challenging responsibility to the way we live. Our style of life is profoundly affected by our belief that God somehow needs us to continually keep co-creating the world with him. We begin to realise that the kingdom of God is first built by us and each other’s hearts. Our worldview is immediately and radically altered. Our relationship to ourselves to each other, to the world and to God is fundamentally impacted. In God we live and move and have our being. Empowered by the Spirit nothing is impossible anymore.

 (Passion for the Possible pp 17 -18)