Like the Burning Bush

 In his marvelous new book, Light From Light, Bishop Robert Barron has an interesting observation:

When the gods of ancient mythology enter the world, they always do so destructively, something in the world order giving way in order for them to appear.  But there is none of this in regard to the true God, whose relationship with creation is beautifully expressed in the biblical image of the burning bush.  The closer God comes to a creature, the more that creature is enhanced and rendered splendid (p. 22-23).

We see this dynamic at work in the ministry of Jesus, when he says to the paralytic, "Your sins are forgiven," and the paralytic stands up, takes up his mat and walks out of the building.   Or again, when Mary of Magdala is released from the prison-hold of seven demons and begins to follow Jesus and the disciples, "ministering to them from [her] own means."  Or, when the seas rage and foam and the winds threaten to overturn the boat, and He stands and commands the wind and waves to subside.

People tend to fear the entrance of God into their lives, but reading the Gospels should dispel that fear entirely.  Adam and Eve feared the Presence of God in the garden after they had sinned, but it was not the nature of God that threatened them.  Rather, in some unfathomed sense of the order of the universe, they "knew" that they had surrendered their divine right to dominion over nature.  We were instructed to 'tend the garden' through Adam, to maintain the beauty and harmony of the universe.  But once we lose, or have lost, the Spirit of harmony, truth, and goodness within our persons, we have not the wisdom and understanding of things needed to maintain the balance and beauty of creation.  Nature -- spiders, snakes, and storms--- tends to overwhelm and threaten our existence, rather than to enhance it.

Sometime after I had experienced a kind of rebirth through a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit in my life, I was walking home one lazy summer afternoon after spending some time on the beach.  Suddenly, I kind of caught my breath when an interior voice said, "Come; I will show you the world created by my Father!"  And in that moment, I began to see with a new sharpness of vision things I had formerly passed by without observation -- leaves on a tree, blades of grass shining in splendor, birds, squirrels, sunlight playing on a leaf.  If it had been a movie, there would have been splendid music, along the order of Cinderella with the mice, or Sleeping Beauty in the forest.

Here's my point:  when God does enter our lives, nothing of our humanity is destroyed or diminished.  Instead, everything in us comes alive:  our minds are sharpened with wisdom and understanding; our emotions are re-ordered to love what God loves and hate what God hates; our wills are strengthened to choose the good instead of what is harmful to us.  Our bodies, too, "know full well that You are my God," in the Living Bible's translation of David's words in Psalm 16.  Nothing in us is destroyed at the entrance of God into our lives, except sin and hatefulness, except death itself.  Instead, like the burning bush, we come alive.  Everything in us is enhanced, on fire, so to speak.  We see further, we know more, we love more, we hear more, our bodies begin to function the way they are designed to.....

Not that all of this happens at once, or even before our death.  Most of the great saints experienced what St. Paul called "a thorn in the flesh," and many of them died from terrible diseases.  But grace, the Presence of the Holy Spirit, overcame the defeat that disorder brings in its wake.  Christ has overcome even sickness and death, so that we are beaten down but not defeated, in the words of St. Paul. 

There is not much I can recall from high school Literature, but one poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins has remained in my memory all these years.  I think it perfectly expresses what I am trying to say here:

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil 
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs---

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Because of the renewing Presence of God in our lives, "The soul of one who loves God always swims in joy, always keeps holiday, and is always in the mood for singing" (St. John of the Cross).