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A reflection from David Jackson

Today I read this quote from Bede Griffith:

“I had long been familiar with the mystical tradition of the West, but I felt the need of something more which the East alone could give; above all the sense of the presence of God in nature and the soul, a kind of natural mysticism which is the basis of all Indian spirituality." [1]
(Christ in India. Bede Griffiths 1966) Quoted by Richard Rohr in the Daily Meditation of September 25th, 2020.

This phrase leapt out at me: "The sense of the presence of God in nature and the soul".
It struck me that I ought to confess that the ‘real presence’ of Christ is hard enough to find in any experience I have ever had of the sacraments, let alone in "nature or in my soul". An awareness of that wider presence only becomes real, in moments of remembering, in recollection, in a sort of picturing of a presence or person, as if of a face not quite glimpsed round a corner. But it leaves a growing conviction that we exist in the presence of a providence, a loving rest, barely identifiable, never to be realised in the present, always just out of reach. This comes obliquely, as a mix of thought and a feeling in the heart and guts, more of the heart than of the head. If any name can be given to this mix of head, heart and gut, it is aided by insights summing up others’ experience of the same absent presence, all- encompassing, all- embracing.
So:
“There is some divinity shapes our ends, rough-hew them how He will” (Hamlet, Shakespeare)
“Now we see through a mist darkly” (St Paul)
“Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Jesus)
“Jesus is present to us in our distracted daily mind and daily affairs, and he is present to us in the healing process. And he is present to us on this side of the wall which The Cloud of Unknowing says is our cross.” (Lawrence Freeman, Daily Meditation WCCM 25 September 2020)
“God comes to us, disguised as our life”. (Anon)

In times of meditation there can be an overwhelming sense of this total personal mixture and it comes as a deep disturbance of and in a silence and a sense, beyond words, of just ‘being’.
It is true, no doubt, that if the Being of, in all being, the “I Am” of the theophany of Moses at the burning bush could be more ‘seen’ than this, that very visibility would preclude ‘it’ being God, who by definition is that which cannot be encompassed by our human thoughts, descriptions or imagining - it must be left un-nameable as ‘beingness’ or Am-ness. This is the whole Jewish tradition of not naming God. So Moses is only able to see the “back” of the divine presence on Sinai, and that is sufficient to turn his hair white.
Like Bede Griffith, with much less, but some acquaintance of and friendship with members of other faiths as a student of dialogue, inter-religious and inter-spiritual relations, I too found my western brand of intellectual theology and then mysticism enriched by the hidden but real presence of the Divine in the Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Jews I met.
Now for many the experience of the hidden presence of the Universal Christ in nature and the soul, deepened by experience of the pandemic, has to be paramount, in these times of locked churches and limited access to the sacraments. It is also a time to hear the Divine in the cries of the poor and of the earth with increased attention and action for justice and peace which are marks of the ‘Kingdom of God’.
“In the shelter of one another, the people live.” Our communion and community may be now less centred round an experience of church or parish, and much more focused round the community and communion of the poor and with all those who work to preserve our frail environment. This enforced redirection of our focus can bring us to a heightened awareness of that wider ‘sacramentality’ of the whole of creation. We reconnect with sacred creation, the first book of revelation, that wider incarnation of the divine in all things. It was from this good world that Jesus emerged as the Incarnate Son of Man. It was from the story of a divine -human dialogue, the story of liberation and selection of his people and the land that he took the images for the parables and the fruits of the earth for the last supper. Following this grounding, in imitation of Jesus the Christ, we can appreciate Diarmuid O’Murchu perspective when he says, "every baby new born comes not so much into the world, as out of the world" to take up its relationship as an "earthling" in deep connectivity with the sacred earth as the dust of dying stars, as divine expression of a creation, groaning in travail to be born a-new.

Lord, we can now pray, "the earth you love is sick, the people you love are sick". Help us to heal, to comfort, to strengthen, to bring your love to all who suffer, who have no food, no home, no work, no hospitals, no country, no place, no hope.
That is where we can be really present, each in any way we can. And so therefore can the God hidden in us, in every heart and in every created thing, be glimpsed in all the love and suffering of our world. Hidden but ever present.