For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand
Gerard Manly Hopkins
As a focus of absolute trust, one to whom you can give yourself without fear of betrayal, the holy mystery of God undergirds and implicitly gives direction to all of a believing person’s enterprises, principles, choices, systems of values, and relationships.
Elizabeth Johnson
A crucial, if not the most basic question of all theology is the question about the right way to speak about God.
Wolfhart Pannenberg
God is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.
Olivier Clement
Knowledge of God is not a subject’s conceptual grasp of an object, it’s sharing what God is.
Rowan Williams
Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that in times
like these and for one like me
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?
R.S. Thomas
Think about where you have experienced the sacred in your life.
Where have you felt God closest to you?
How would you attempt to describe this?
As presence, power, guidance, awe, certainty, forgiveness, hope….?
Did it make any difference?
Was this experience “triggered” by natural beauty, place, participation in worship, art, physical activity, relaxation, illness, bereavement, a crisis in personal relationships, silence…?
Do you let this/these experiences inform your present practice of the awareness of God?
C.S. Lewis called such awareness “Patches of God- light in the woods of our experience” and the contemporary novelist Jane Hamilton has one of her characters say., “For me God was something within that allowed me to see”. It is as if we experience God, not as something we see, but the basis of our seeing, not as an object known, but the basis of all our knowing, not as something of value, but the basis for all our valuing. So instead of thinking that we can “grasp” God, as if God is an object among many objects, but the very basis of all our living and knowing, not an “outside” God at all, but one who is the very subject of my being, allowing me to exist, to be “me”. With Paul I can say, “I live, yet not I, but Christ who lives in me”.
The images in this post are taken from Hildegard of Bingen’s ink and gold leaf illumination, God, Cosmos and Humanity from her first book Scivias in which she describes a series of visions she experienced.
“I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows.”
Spiritus sanctus vivificans
vita movens omnia,
et radix est in omni creatura
ac omnia de inmunditia abluit,
tergens crimina ac ungit vulnera,
et sic est fulgens ac laudabilis vita,
suscitans et resuscitans
omnia.
The Holy Spirit: living and life-giving,
the life that’s all things moving,
the root in all created being:
of filth and muck it washes all things clean—
out-scrubbing guilty staining, its balm our wounds constraining—
and so its life with praise is shining,
rousing and reviving
all.
For a printable PDF of the text of this meditation please click on the link below.
