The Divinity Around Us

“We do not fully sense the divinity around us,” writes Lawrence Wood in FEASTING on the WORD (B 1:243). “Exhaustion has so dulled our hearts, minds and souls that we can work all day in the temple but never hear God.” Yep. The air around me is filled with words that are angry, resigned or nostalgic. My senses are over- stimulated with the wasteland of political demise and celebrity overkill. Readings for this upcoming weekend honor our guilty rat-race while reminding us that a spoken and lively Word can come to resource us and draw us onward to our next spiritual plateau.

Young Samuel was the apprentice to Eli, the chief priest at Shiloh, the principle worship-center of the Jewish people before Jerusalem. In the middle of the night, when all the earth was quiet, God’s Voice came to Samuel (I Samuel 3:1-20) telling him to tell Eli that his (Eli’s) family was to be quenched because of their careless attitude towards the Holy. Troubled by this rarely-heard Voice, Samuel later claimed this moment as his own epiphany: “As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.” Seems to me that God wasn’t observed because everyone was too busy and preoccupied, sometimes even with good stuff. As Isaac S. Villegas has written, “[Meaningful dialogue with God] is patience in the darkness of night, listening for a voice.”(SOJOURNERS, January 2021, page 49)

The Epistle is Paul’s cautionary words to the Corinthians, 6:12-20–and to us, their cosmopolitan heirs. The passage could be simplified into a polemic against commercial sex, but it seems as though there’s a deeper meaning: don’t profane what God has created to be wonderful! In an allegory, Paul speaks of a lasting relationship being much superior to a momentary gasp. If divinity is all around us, why trade off seeing and reveling in this for a peep-show? Here is the issue with what’s “lawful” versus participation in a sense of Ongoing Creation. Our insistence upon individual “freedoms” has sheltered our eyes from the appreciation of God’s Work all around us.

So why has Jesus traveled to Bethsaida? Just to pick up a couple of disciples? According to John 1:43-51, Jesus saw Nathaniel “under the fig tree”, a figure of speech for a place/attitude of introspection. In other words, Nathaniel was ready! “But you don’t know the half of it,” the Lord replies. “Good” can come not only from Nazareth, but from the slums of Tehran/old tenements of Lower East Side/the Fort Apache of your own neighborhood. Creation’s glory exceeds both what we know and what we hopefully imagine. Nathaniel’s “lack of guile” may well reflect the “you get what you see” presentation of the person touched by Christ.

Perhaps these cold days of January are good for hunkering down–at a socially safe distance–by our campfires to tell the tales of God’s ongoing Creation. In the words of Pastor Michelle, “where have you seen God at work this week?” Contemplative people can affirm that divinity exists all around us; we’re called to hear and see and participate in the many gifts that God has brought.

In the process of unfolding, Horace Brown King

Biblical texts for the upcoming weekend slap me in the face every Tuesday at this spot on Facebook; or at horacebrownking.com