Your One Shining Moment
The coming of summer touches us all and opens our hearts. At these times there is often a pathos, a poignancy and a bitter-sweet tinge to our emotions. Many of us have memories of one special day, recently or long ago, when deep in our soul something beautiful happened.
As summer approaches do you have any such intimate recollections to linger over, memories that will never go away, a shining moment you will never forget? Reflect on it for a few seconds. Such moments are so special, small sacraments of divine beauty. We keep them in a treasured place. On an early summer’s day we feel the urge to unlock those lovely secrets.
Into every life, I like to think, comes one special moment. The curtains part, the vision is clarified, and something is changed forever. It is an epiphany of grace and it can be very ordinary. Yet it can colour the whole of our lives. It is highly personal; it is a timeless time; it is a touch of heaven.
It can be the simplest thing on earth. I remember the long-ago evening I first floated a paper boat in the local stream; the morning I finally succeeded in riding a bike; the day I wore my first new brown double-breasted suit; my first love. And later, a graced moment that lifted a burden from a friend’s shoulders; the blessing of forgiveness, recovery from a loss, being able to begin again.
Your one shining moment may have to do with naming what, or who, you really love; with giving up the job or the relationship that is slowly destroying you; with discovering that you need no longer carry so much hidden anger or fear, because now you know you are unconditionally loved by a God who thinks you’re so gifted and beautiful; and with knowing that your sins are always forgiven and that you are strongest of all when you feel weakest.
One day it dawns on us that every beauty we encounter is not a random happen-chance but part of a carefully-crafted love story; that God is always coming to us in every experience we have. This is the meaning of Incarnation. It was all revealed to us at the first Christmas. From then on everything is ‘charged with the grandeur of God’ as the poet Gerard Manly Hopkins put it, and there is ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’. This is a central dimension of our faith – to believe and to see the footprints and fingerprints of God everywhere.
No longer, then, are those special shining moments confined to rare occasions. Now, when we learn to see with new and blessed eyes, every happening has the potential to be a shining moment. When you finish reading this reflection, sit silently for a moment, breathing normally and deliberately. Then raise your eyes and look around you. What do you see? Whatever is before you – the view through a window, a shadow on the floor, a loved one, a dog or a cat, a table with food on it – can you somehow glimpse the face of God in these ordinary scenes?
Even during our most desperate, despairing and hopeless times there are touches of the divine surrounding us. It is not always easy to see the light at a time of great darkness. When something terrible happens in our midst it takes time before we can see any meaning or sign of God’s love or presence. Sudden tragedy numbs our souls. Thus it was at the Crucifixion. And then, later, the shining moment of Easter spread all over the world. In time, it will reach our hearts too.