Balancing Act

Welcome and Good Morning!

Life is a constant balancing act for me and maybe, for you, too. Right now I'm trying to find my spiritual balance. It's funny how something not so big, like a friend on vacation, can throw you off balance spiritually. But when it is a spiritual mentor, well it just does.
This spiritual quest I am on is being fed by God, in one way, through a series of meditations by Fr. Richard Rohr. They are speaking to me in a deeper part of my soul. I like when that happens. I feel full; like I've eaten a very satisfying banquet. This year Fr. Rohr is focusing on the Divine in Nature. I'm sharing today's meditation with you. I hope if feeds your soul as well.

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Eleven

The Natural World

The Substance of God
Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Many indigenous spiritualities, Franciscans, and Celts saw creation as good, as a theophany or revelation of God’s very being, just as Genesis taught. How did Christianity come to be so divorced from nature? John Philip Newell (b. 1953), a poet and scholar known for his work in the field of Celtic spirituality, traces the roots and impact of the doctrine creatio ex nihilo. He offers an alternative, still orthodox, view of creation based on the writings of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon:

Irenaeus [130-202] . . . taught that the whole of creation flows from the very “substance” of God. [1] All things carry within them the essence of the One. Irenaeus . . . signaled his concern about the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. . . . This was to become the standard of Western Christianity’s approach to creation. Creation would be viewed not as coming forth from the substance of God but as fashioned from afar by a distant Creator, made out of nothing from on high.

Irenaeus intuited that this would be a disaster, that to neutralize matter, to teach that creation does not come from holy substance, would lead to the abuse of creation. It was a convenient “truth” . . . [meaning] that the empire could do whatever it wished to matter. Matter was not holy. It had not come forth from the womb of God’s Being. Rather it was made from nothing. It was essentially devoid of sacred energy. So, every imperial mind could ravage the earth’s resources with impunity. It could disparage the rights of creatures and subordinate the physical well-being of its subjects. Religion had become the accomplice of the state’s subordination of the earth. It had sanctioned the separation of spirit and matter.

Irenaeus . . . passionately taught that the substance of the earth and its creatures carries within itself the life of the Holy One. God, he said, is both “above us all and in us all.” [2] God is both transcendent and immanent. And the work of Jesus, he taught, was not to save us from our nature but to restore us to our nature and to bring us back into relationship with the deepest sound within creation. In his commentary on the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, in which all things are described as spoken into being by God, Irenaeus sees Jesus not as speaking a new word but as uttering again the first word, the sound at the beginning and the heart of life. He describes Jesus as “recapitulating” the original work of the Creator, as articulating again what we have forgotten and what needs to be repeated, the Sound from which all life has come. [3] Jesus re-sounds the beginning. He resounds with what is deepest in the matter of the universe.

. . . The Christ story is the universe story. The birth of the divine-human child is a revelation, a lifting of the veil to show us that all life has been conceived by the Spirit in the womb of the universe, that we are all divine-human creatures, that everything that has being in the universe carries within itself the sacredness of Spirit.

 "Just as Genesis taught." 
That is what Genesis teaches us, isn't it? He gave everything he created to Adam and Eve to care for. As a whole, we are not doing a very good job of that command, are we? Many individuals, yes. As a whole, not so good.
Good food for thought.

I happen to agree with this meditation that says nature comes from God's very being, His sacred energy. How could you read Genesis any other way?

And the Psalms tell us that, too.
Psalm 33:6  By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of His mouth.
Heady stuff.

Gratitude
1. God's creation of nature.
2. Starry nights
3. Animals

Blessings,
Deborah