To live is Holy

(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light)

In his celebrated Jubilee letter, Pope John Paul engaged with a theology of creation. As well as telling the mythical tale of humanity’s fall from grace and a subsequent salvation, this rich understanding of revelation holds that creation and incarnation can also be read as the greatest love story, revealing all of us as being a delight to God, carefully fashioned in God’s image. With or without a definitive ‘fall’, God would have longed for an intimate union with a human being and could not have been prevented from assuming the beautiful humanity of a man called Jesus.

And it came to pass that the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us. All the hunches that a universal and divine energy ran through the still centre of everything, sustaining and nurturing growth and evolution of every kind, could now be completely believed. In Jesus, all the hints suspicions and guesses about the God who moved the inner heart of things, nourishing and caressing all forms of becoming, were, once for all, vindicated. From now on the matter was beyond discussion- the unquestioned humanity of Jesus Christ was the living symbol and sacrament of God’s assumption of creation as God’s earthly mode of being.

The arrival of Jesus on the stage of life’s evolution brought the drama of God and the world into another Act. God’s pure essence, which is love, is now guaranteed forever, as being the source of the life of all living things. Those early Hebrews seers and prophets who, in the holy stillness, heard the faint muffled rhythm of a deeper music, were not mistaken. Their pre-Christian souls were finely attuned to the divine score, long before it flowed across the world with its stunning beauty, in the Symphony that was Jesus.

I write this to provide a theological rationale for holding that to live is holy, that to simply be is blessed and that the condition of awareness is a true form of adoration. This prayer of awareness is coming from the gurus of the East and from the poets of the West, from the mystics of the past and the contemplatives of the present. It is as old as the hills and as new as a baby. It is not a special kind of awareness about a special kind of subject. It is any kind of true awareness about any part of created reality.

That is why an intent and focused silence in the face of this amazing mystery is the main condition for hearing God’s heartbeat in the cacophony of our lives. That is why to simply be in the presence of the immediate commerce of life is the closest we can get to worship.

The present moment is the real presence of God.

(Travelling Light pp187,188)