The Heart of Matter: Noticing
Tuesday, May 17th
“It is important to return to the book of creation as the book of God because creation expresses God. Creation is not a backdrop for human drama but the disclosure of God’s identity.”
—Ilia Delio, “The Emergent Christ”
“Es importante que volvamos al libro de la creación como libro de Dios, porque la creación refleja a Dios. La creación no es el escenario donde ocurre el drama humano, sino la revelación de la propia identidad de Dios.”
—Ilia Delio, “The Emergent Christ”
Incarnational Practice: Noticing
This week we invite you to sit and notice the sounds and sights of nature. To sit and notice clouds slowly changing shape until they no longer look like themselves and disappear beyond the horizon. To sit and notice a bird singing until it finishes its song, To sit and notice the sun until it fully rises or fully sets. What is creation telling you about God?
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What is being revealed? What is being moved? What is being asked?
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Today I received he gift of the presence o a Monarch butterfly–for the first time in years. The sight of this beautiful creature among the dandelions was a reminder of God’s gifts and a reminder to slow down enough receive the gift.
Yesterday in the garden, God revealed the living reality of creation, it required living, dying and rising to new life. Beautiful experience.
Springtime, the flowering of trees like the magnolia, return of the song birds and the gorgeous greening tells me that God is beauty, ever new and faithful to making all things new.
Noticing the sun rise and set can lift out hearts and minds to the Great Mystery in which we are emersed. But more can be said. For instance, the sun doesn’t rise and set. Rather the Earth, our wonderful home planet, revolves. Our giant mass of mass turns on its axis and each day faces sunward and each not, the opposite. Knowing the incredible mass and energized forces that are operative all around us (and in us and between us) is essentially miraculous. When you notice. Yes, reflect on it all and wonder deeply of how this is, and even more, why.
My husband and I watched the eclipse of the moon at midnight one early morning this past week. What it told me about God is that sometimes when something is hidden, it generates opportunities for other things to be seen. In normal moonlight we never would have been able to see as many stars and the Milky Way. Or the red hue on the moon created by sunlight penetrating our Earth’s atmosphere. So it is with loss, it can break our hearts open to new revelations of courage and growth.
Sitting outdoors on a chair in Florida. Surrounded by blue skies, birdsong, a forest for my neighbor. A pair of lovebugs landed on the arm of my chair. Paused & watched them closely navigate tirelessly the terrain on my chair. Observed that the back partner of this love bug was a small baby! Attached to its mother, still. And the stigma attached to these tiny critters for the harm they do to
paint in cards, visual obstruction while driving, mating, etc. dissolved
for a sacred moment, as I celebrated this mother and her baby’s existence in
The Big Picture… Amen.
Awe and more AWE. Open mouthed AWE!!!
Any time I am in nature I notice God. My prayer for humanity is that each person becomes aware of their Engoddedness and the awesome responsibility that awareness entails, sooner rather than later. It would make for a better world. I have just spent 40 years mostly teaching teenagers that God Is love and exists in all things and all things exist in God. I taught them that very little else is important. Time well spent I believe.
Human Beings have lost their way. If anyone needs proof, just watch the news. We have forgotten that we are, not only a part of nature, but nature itself, attached to all that is. We need to live from our bodies, especially the heart, instead of playing games from the neurons of our brains. Human Beings “think” life into all of the mess and factions that exist today and take us away from nature, and maybe even eventually, destroying it.
After a heavy overnight storm, as I ran I could hear the frogs “singing” in the deep drainage ditches. The sound was a reminder of God’s care for all creation.