When we were children we thought of God as being somewhere “up there” looking down on us. As we grew in faith and life experience, God seemed closer, closer, until we recognised God within us. This was not something we were told. We could actually feel it and there were no words to describe it.
Then God revealed more. We saw the light of God in other people, glimpsed it in the song of a bird, the wings of a butterfly, the breaking of waves on a shore. We felt the
inter-connectedness of everything and believed that God had created this unity.
Now we know that God is the unity. God is the intelligence, the energy, the love that makes the whole beautiful design operate. God is not just up there, but moving in all directions at once, and we are a part of that flow.
Joseph Campbell once said, “The universe is not just a product made by God. It is a manifestation of God.”
Remember Moses and the burning bush? Moses had killed an Egyptian and been forced into exile for several years. He was in the Sinai desert, tending a flock of sheep, when he came across a bush that was on fire but unburnt. Curious, Moses was drawing closer, when a voice from the flames told him to take off his shoes because he was on sacred ground.
I guess Moses must have wondered who owned the voice, because God then said to him, “I AM who I AM.”
What kind of name is that? How does it resonate inside us? To me it sounded like “I AM and there is nothing else.”
Thanks to a rabbi friend, I discovered there was more to God’s statement than was in my understanding. Jewish scholars say that our translation is inadequate. The Hebrew word cannot be translated so simply into English. A sentence is needed to give some kind of sense that the proper noun is also a verb.
“I AM is the I AM that is always evolving.
God is continually making himself/herself manifest.
Isn’t this true in our lives? If we look back at our faith journey, we see that God has been constantly shaping us and taking us to a larger place. The I AM is not only in a burning bush. It is everywhere we look and we are a part of it.
When we see this, we are overwhelmed by the knowledge of how much God loves creation. It is his favourite disguise and he is never separate from it. Our hearts take off their shoes in the presence of a love so big it chose to become one with us.
We live on a eucharistic planet.
- Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.
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