I’ve always wondered about this: how could Cleopas and Simon, in Luke's Gospel, see Jesus on the road to Emmaus and not recognize him? What about the Apostles who went fishing, according to John, and caught nothing and then met a man on the shore they didn't know who helped them fill their net. How could they have been so blind not to recognize God-among-them? How do you spend time with someone you love dearly and not know him?
Have you seen God today? God is there in every moment if we take the time to look and reflect and be open to God’s presence.
The Celts believed God was present in all of creation. God’s spirit poured out of tree, rock, water, flower. Every part of creation, according to Celtic Spirituality, is God giving light and love to us over and over. Not only did they see God in all things, but in all people. Each of us is knitted into the fabric of God’s love, God’s plan of creation. Celtic knotwork is a depiction of how we are all interwoven with God, each of us connected, tied together, each depending on one another to keep the connections strong.
St. Patrick’s Breastplate promises, in part:
I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the starlit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
Around the old eternal rocks.
Jesuit Spirituality has similar beliefs: finding God in all things. Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins writes beautifully in his poem, Pied Beauty:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trip.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
It is no accident that Easter falls during spring, that the Resurrection occurs simultaneously with the rebirth of creation. The very name “Easter”’ comes from the Gaelic word for egg and is intertwined with an old pagan custom of welcoming spring.
Several springs ago, I sat cradled in the arms of an ancient crone of an apple tree at the Benedictine Priory in Mt. Angel. Sitting among the creamy pink blooms, I reflected on the families of blossoms, the neighborhoods, the entire tree a city of blossoms; apples waiting to be born.
The tree had been giving apples to the Sisters for generations. The tree wasn’t worried about last year’s late frost that killed so many tender blooms. It didn’t care about heavy winds or relentless rains of former springs that destroyed the blossoms before the bees could make love to them. Its heart and mind and energy – its tree spirit – focused only on the current year’s blooms, on the hopes it had for that crop of apples and the gifts they would be to the Sisters who had nurtured the trees for so many years, and for the hungry families, the deer and raccoons and birds, that would gain sustenance from the fruit.
I found God in the arms of that tree, her blooms, the ants using her branches as highways. I find God whenever I take the time to look and allow creation to speak to me of God’s abundant, forgiving, glorious love.
This spring, open yourself to God speaking to you continually through creation. Walk with God’s beauty surrounding you constantly and see God there, recognize Jesus risen and among us. As Fr. John said in the Easter Vigil homily: Be open to amazement. You will surely find it, sometimes whispering but sometimes singing, through creation.
TravelinLady
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