Frosted Spider Web
Everything that God made is good. And as one medieval mystic liked to say, Every created thing is a Word of God. To those who can see, every created thing, living or inanimate, speaks of God and the Creator. Few poets have expressed this as well as the English Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things” and “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”. (http://livingspace.sacredspace.ie/C1227R/)
John’s Gospel does not contain an infancy narrative. Rather, John the Mystic wants to place the Christ as pre-existent “in the beginning” and dancing the dance of life as creation flares forth from the Living One. The Christ is God made flesh and incarnate among us. The Cosmic Christ lives in us and in the Cosmos as the Life Force, the Energy which propels life toward the Omega Point which is Christ in his fullness.
The Christ is not up there and out there because up there and out here no longer makes sense in a universe of billions of galaxies. Just recently NASA scientists discovered earth-liker planets beyond our galaxy. Galileo lives!
The divine, the eternal is the “dearest freshness deep down things” as Hopkins says so eloquently. The Christ is the deepest reality in us. “I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me.” Each of us is a Word of God.
As we study the cosmos we stand in wonder before all that is—all that is a Word of God. Paul told the Athenians that he was speaking of the God who had spoken to them through created reality. With all due apologies to St. Jerome, creation is the primary revelation of God. Scripture; inspired human reflection on the Word of God, is secondary. Hopkins gets it, “All creation is charged with the grandeur of God.” Creation is the doxa, the very glory of God, made manifest.
With the birth of Christ, in the words of the O Holy Night, “He appeared and the soul felt its worth.” Twas truly a “night divine.”
The Christ lives in us and makes us one with all that is—one another, ourselves, the Living One, and the cosmos itself. The Christ within us enables us to become that which we are. The Christ within us unleashes all the potential and love power of our true selves becoming Christ. The Christ within is the energy of the cosmos flaring forth to new risen life. We are the grandeur of the Living One, the deep-down freshness of the divine becoming human to become divine.
Richard Rohr reminds us that our most difficult task is to be human. ChristPower molds us and shapes us into the very image of the Living One.
. . .
for the life was made visible;
we have seen it and testify to it
and proclaim to you the eternal life [now not later]
that was with the Father and was made visible to us?
what we have seen and heard
we proclaim now to you,
so that you too may have fellowship with us;
for our fellowship is with the Father
and with his Son, Jesus Christ.
We are writing this so that our joy may be complete. (1 John)
Eternal life manifest within us, the very grandeur of the Living One, the deep down freshness of divinity, brings us joy—a joy that lasts through all of life’s ups and downs. Joy is much more than pleasure. Even amid the deepest tragedy, the deepest suffering, we know that Christ lives in us and is making us whole.