Slipping
On my shoes
Boiling water
Toasting Bread,
Buttering the Sky:
That should be enough contact
With God in one day
To make anyone
Crazy
- Hafiz
There’s the story of Jacob and his dream. It doesn’t happen in a temple, or a special holy place. Neither on a mountaintop or a lush verdant oasis with beautiful flowers and smells lifting the mind to God and his creation. This was a desert. Desolate. Barren. Uncomfortable. He had to use a rock for a pillow. And it is here that he is given a glimpse of a deeper reality. Of the invisible movement of God in that place, the hidden picture that he didn't see. And so we have that great line of Jacob's upon awakening (in more ways than one): "Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not" (Gen 28:16)
There was a 17th century Jesuit by the name of Jean-Pierre De Caussade who wrote a small book of spiritual direction. In it, he refers to Jesus with an interesting phrase. He calls him the Sacrament of the Present Moment, writing "He who recognizes a king in disguise treats him very differently from he who sees before him only the figure of an ordinary man…. Likewise, the souls who can recognize God in the most trivial, the most grievous and the most mortifying things that happen to them in their lives, honor everything equally…” For Caussade, the true nature of our existence is that the presence of God is not something removed that must be coaxed and convinced to come closer. God is here...now. We only need to learn to see and in seeing, to follow the moments of our lives as the unfolding of our experience of God and the expression of God working in our lives.
This is hard to grasp because it is, after all, just our everyday life he’s talking about, filled with ordinary things that most of us wouldn’t think of as spiritual, certainly not as something sacred. That is supposed to be something high, removed, something extraordinary. Something that doesn't happen every day. The secret here is that this experience of God looks and feels so much like our ordinary life, because it is our ordinary life. For those who can refocus their eyes, to see the hidden picture Cassaude writes that: “All that remains is to be ready to grasp God who is close beside them at each step and each moment in all the various situations that arise in never ending succession along their way." And so because Jesus is the sacrament of the present moment, then every moment is a holy moment. Every place is a holy place. If we can recognize it.
"Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not"
On my shoes
Boiling water
Toasting Bread,
Buttering the Sky:
That should be enough contact
With God in one day
To make anyone
Crazy
- Hafiz
There’s the story of Jacob and his dream. It doesn’t happen in a temple, or a special holy place. Neither on a mountaintop or a lush verdant oasis with beautiful flowers and smells lifting the mind to God and his creation. This was a desert. Desolate. Barren. Uncomfortable. He had to use a rock for a pillow. And it is here that he is given a glimpse of a deeper reality. Of the invisible movement of God in that place, the hidden picture that he didn't see. And so we have that great line of Jacob's upon awakening (in more ways than one): "Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not" (Gen 28:16)
There was a 17th century Jesuit by the name of Jean-Pierre De Caussade who wrote a small book of spiritual direction. In it, he refers to Jesus with an interesting phrase. He calls him the Sacrament of the Present Moment, writing "He who recognizes a king in disguise treats him very differently from he who sees before him only the figure of an ordinary man…. Likewise, the souls who can recognize God in the most trivial, the most grievous and the most mortifying things that happen to them in their lives, honor everything equally…” For Caussade, the true nature of our existence is that the presence of God is not something removed that must be coaxed and convinced to come closer. God is here...now. We only need to learn to see and in seeing, to follow the moments of our lives as the unfolding of our experience of God and the expression of God working in our lives.
This is hard to grasp because it is, after all, just our everyday life he’s talking about, filled with ordinary things that most of us wouldn’t think of as spiritual, certainly not as something sacred. That is supposed to be something high, removed, something extraordinary. Something that doesn't happen every day. The secret here is that this experience of God looks and feels so much like our ordinary life, because it is our ordinary life. For those who can refocus their eyes, to see the hidden picture Cassaude writes that: “All that remains is to be ready to grasp God who is close beside them at each step and each moment in all the various situations that arise in never ending succession along their way." And so because Jesus is the sacrament of the present moment, then every moment is a holy moment. Every place is a holy place. If we can recognize it.
"Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not"
blessings,
sam
