Windows of Wonder

Basically, the Catholic sacramental imagination is an effort to recover a revealed insight about the meaning of the incarnation.  That insight concerns the actual enfleshing of God’s own self, first in Jesus, and because of our solidarity with him, in all of us as well. It would look to our humanity and to our human experiences as the prime site, so to speak, for the unfolding of, and for encounter with, the incarnate presence of God. It is so important to believe that God is in no way diminished when nature and humanity are revealed as potentially divine.

That we are created in God’s image is a truth to be assimilated in different ways, at different levels, through many media – and slowly throughout our lives. It is too wondrous to believe that we are living co-creators of divine beauty, blessed with extraordinary power and  grace. Here are a few brief reminders and pointers to these truths. St Simeon wrote: ‘These hands of mine are the hands of God; this body of mine is the body of God because of the incarnation.’ The mystic Meister Eckhart preached: ‘You are God’s seed. As the pear seed grows into the pear tree and the hazel seed becomes the hazel tree, so does God’s seed in you become God.’ St Andrew reminds us in the Office of Readings for Our Lady’s birthday, that the Word-made-flesh is ‘the unveiling of the mystery……..and the deification of human nature assumed by God.’  The language of St Thomas is disturbingly forthright.  Creation was not radically re-adjusted in the incarnation, he held; rather it was essentially completed in Christ. ‘The incarnation accomplished this, that God became human and that human beings became God…..’ Running through the streets of Genoa, St Catherine startled the shoppers by shouting with delight ‘My deepest me is God.’

The poets and artists, the mystics and contemplatives, are never tired of exploring the dimension of the mystery. For them the smallest particle of creation becomes a window on God’s beauty. They see eternity in the grain of sand and infinity in an hour.  Their intense energy is spent on revealing how the world is charged with the grandeur of God.  They forever use images and symbols to catch the fire-fly glimpses of the extraordinary presence of the Spirit of Wonder beneath the seemingly superficial and ordinary.  The work of the true teacher, too, they point out, is to notice the seeds of sacramentality scattered all around.

We can only teach it, and hear it, with immense reverence and joy.  And the wise teacher will remember that there will always be ‘something preventing us from recognising him’ – strong feelings, to do with original sin, of resistance and anxiety around such holy work. There  is no dualism here. In a truly incarnational theology of creation, nature and grace are not side by side, or over against each other. The one is the context for the other. Neither is diminished by the other: they both complement each other.

And so sacramental vision is achieved, not just with new spectacles, but by new eyes. It embraces what is there, and intensifies its meaning.  It celebrates reality and exposes its true nature.  It diminishes nothing, only enhances everything.  It reveals the meaning below the meaning, the beauty behind the beauty, the mystery within the mystery.  The basic, faded image of God is cleaned up and revealed in its original colours; a profound spiritual dimension is rediscovered within the often-shallow surface of life.

Unfamiliar at first, the day may come when we finally begin to understand, at the depths of our being, like second nature, that the human is the threshold to the reality of God. ‘The gateway to heaven is everywhere’ wrote St Catherine of Sienna.  As St John Chrysostom put it, ‘Seek the key that unlocks the human heart; the same key opens the heart of God.’ ‘Salvation,’ the Church Fathers remind us, ‘hinges on the flesh.’ From now on our attention and focus will be trained on recognising the God of surprises hiding and playing at the heart of life.