The Energy called God
Everything Belongs and is Already Within
When I look at the utter magic of nature, at the exquisite colouring and shaping of all things, the endless variety of species, the time and tuning of things, the rhythm and rhyme of things, the miracles of scientific discoveries, the astonishing newness of life’s unfolding, I say to myself ‘Is this source, force and energy of life the same mystery that we call God; the God we worship as the Father of Jesus, the God we receive and become one with in the intimacy of Holy Communion?’ I ask myself if this is one true way of entering into the delightful meaning of Incarnation, the mystery that defines Christianity.
When I stand in wonder before a Van Gogh or a Caravaggio, when I am deeply moved by the strains of a Mozart or a Beethoven, when I am transported by the words and imagery of a Shakespeare or a Heaney, is this a primary and an authentic experience of the incarnate essence of the Christian God? Is it not at least as authentic an experience of the divine as the more explicitly religious and ritualistic expressions of worship we enact? Are these experiences, in fact, for the Christian, the only valid and incontrovertible experiences of God’s true nature and real presence? And, rather than conflicting with each other in any way, do they not, in fact, complement each other. Is not the role of the distinct sacraments that of keeping us forever in mind of the wider sacramentality of the whole world; we celebrate liturgy knowing that it is always pointing away from itself, daily affirming the truth of the Incarnation – that our Christian God is a human God and can ever be experienced only in so far as we truly experience our own humanity and the lives we live.
Sometimes, it seems to me, there is too great a distance between our ‘two’ experiences of God – the liturgical in church, and the natural, the real in the world; so great, in fact, that the connection has been lost, the trail has gone cold. They mostly run along parallel lines. But are they not one? We have forgotten the amazing revelation of Incarnation that heals that separation. Suppose we look at the daily reality of the furrowing blade that dissects the earth, the seeds that are sown in the fertile brown soil; or we think of the world wide electronic connections across the oceans and continents connecting us all like a cosmic web; or we find ourselves in a city or airport where the intense and rapid movement of people driven by a million different pursuits is almost too much for us to take in, or we find ourselves in contexts utterly foreign to our usual habitat, or with people whose understanding of life and God is totally different to ours. And suppose then that we go to Mass. How often do we connect those two ‘presences’ of God – the natural, the graced? Does the one inform the other? Does our understanding of ‘sacramentality’ reach far enough, like an infinite umbrella or web or leaf of veins, to hold all in the one loving embrace? Does the threadbare wafer unite all these experiences into the intimacy, into the one vibrating, intensely alive beating heart of Mystery herself?
How consciously do we identify the raw, natural, sometimes shocking indwelling of Mystery in every startling or insignificant or chaotic happening the world over, with the God of religion? When we go to Mass do we close the doors on to the secular streets of a so-called Godless city behind us, or do we carefully and adoringly bring it all in with us, knowing that not to do so would be to turn our backs on God, on Christian Incarnation? When we eat and drink the holy bread and wine are we consciously and physically embracing the reality of the miracles of love, pain and hope that pulse through the hearts and minds of those struggling, worthy, perhaps churchless people we all too often refer to as ‘unspiritual’ or ‘worldly’?
Do ‘Life’ and ‘God’ mean exactly the same?
The mystery of life is one thing; the mystery of God another. But to what extent are they different? To what extent are they the same? Life and God. The One Being. Has this sense of oneness, this intimation of unity, not become more evident since the moment of Incarnation? There is an amazing transformation of ‘faith’ in our understanding and imaging of God when these two realities are identified as One; the Being of Life, the Being of God. ‘O God’, wrote Teilhard de Chardin, ‘you are as intimate as life itself’. Pope Francis equated God with Being – and the Church offers many other ‘magnanimous’ (a word loved by the Pope) terms for this Mystery of Love. Even the old catechisms that greeted our birth contained the question ‘Where is God?’ And the answer ‘God is everywhere’.
So, do we place too great a divide between our concept of God and our concept of life itself, both referred to, we have seen, as pure Being? After all ‘Being’ is an orthodox Christian term for God. Is it true, then, that there is nothing we can say of life’s source and essence that cannot be said equally accurately of the God of Christians? And vice versa. We call God our mother, our life, our essential being. In these Reflections I meditate on the distance we often place between what we call the ‘merely’ natural or material of our world, and the ‘super’natural nature of God. In this respect we seem to remain unaware of what ‘deep’ Incarnation reveals about the true incarnate presence of the Mother of all creation in the unfolding of life itself.
Can ‘life itself’ be addressed as God? What is lost to our accustomed way of understanding the mystery of God when we place all the qualities that we traditionally hold of God in the heart of evolving life itself? Is there not a sublime tenderness and intimacy, for instance, about the essence of a baby, a new morning, a blade of grass? Does not what we call ‘life’ get into the smallest places, healing the tiniest wound? And the cosmic spaces too, guiding their perfect expansion? Is it not absolutely everywhere, and without it nothing would exist? Is it not forever intent on non-judgemental healing and wholeness? Is it not indiscriminate in its largesse, as the sun shines on good and bad alike, as the tree gives shelter to the small frightened animal as well as to the king? If ever the words ‘extravagance’ and ‘compassion’ can be applied anywhere then surely the phenomenon of the goodness of life itself can claim those qualities?
We look at the blue sea and sky, the stars, the purple mountains and we feel an affinity with them. We have come from them. We are all an essential part of each other. Their attractiveness is our attractiveness. We call nature ‘our mother’ as we call God by the same title. The first Creation is the first Incarnation. When faced with the utter joy and infectious beauty and stunning generosity of Being itself in all its forms, what is the difference between these two faces of mystery – the face of the mystery of the life that holds and enfolds us, and the life of the God without whom we would also cease to exist?
Why am I so excited about all of this? Because it radically transforms the way we understand ourselves in this world, the faith we follow, the God we worship, the quality and depth of our daily-life experiences. Given the Christian teaching about Creation and Incarnation, is it not true to hold that whatever we mean by the mystery of God is now available to us only through created being, through all that we mean by life as we know and live it? The notion and nature of an incarnate God is now infused into the nature of matter – and vice versa. The supernatural has become the natural, and grace is only accessible in the experience of created reality. Within Christianity it is a false and deadly division to separate the two. And the Church still does it – see the reaction to these reflections! It has been revealed, once and for all, that creation and nature cannot exist independently of grace. Life and being are now God’s way of being present to us. To experience one is to experience the other.