Hello friends.
This is Mark Gludman,
Also known as Brother Frederick James,
Your friendly neighbourhood monk in dogs.
Welcome back.
To our next installment in our God is series.
Today,
God is in all things.
Now,
Yesterday in our Lectio Divina from Exodus.
.
.
You would have heard in the text,
The text say that Moses turned aside.
And that little detail.
In the story has always interested me.
This is what looking for the details in scripture can do.
I mean,
The bush was burning.
But apparently that wasn't enough.
Moses had to turn aside and see.
And I think maybe this might be an indicator to how revelation often works.
Maybe God's not always absent.
Maybe we're simply facing in the wrong direction.
The burning bush was already burning.
The holy ground was already beneath Moses' feet.
God was already there.
And Moses' job.
Was just to notice,
To turn aside and see.
And I think this is the question that we're going to be sitting with today.
What if God is more present in the world?
Than we've allowed ourselves to imagine.
So as we prepare to enter today,
Just to invite you to steal yourself.
Take a deep breath in.
.
.
A doubt.
And just arrive fully in this moment,
Mind,
Body and heart.
As we ask the Spirit to open our ears,
Our minds and our hearts.
To what we hear and think about.
Through our contemplation today.
So for a long time.
Christianity,
I think,
Has sometimes given the impression that there's two worlds,
The spiritual world and then the ordinary world.
You've got your sacred and your secular.
You've got your heaven and you've got earth.
And things like a church,
That's sacred,
But your kitchen,
That's ordinary.
Things like sitting in prayer,
That's spiritual,
But washing the dishes is not.
That somewhere like a monastery,
Is holy but a supermarket that's just isn't that's not holy at all and you can already start to see what the problem might be what it does is it divides reality into compartments and God gets assigned to only some of those But what if the world is more alive with God than that?
What if the question.
.
.
Isn't where is God,
But where isn't.
God.
Now.
We need to be really careful here because I'm not saying everything is God.
The tree is not God,
The river is not God,
The dog is not God.
Your neighbor,
However convinced they might be,
Is not God.
But maybe everything exists in and through the sustaining presence of God.
So the world isn't God,
But the world is never separate.
From God.
Think back again to Paul's words,
In God we live and move and have our being.
And think about the opening words of John's gospel,
All things came into being through God or through the word.
And Paul's word again in Colossians,
In God all things hold together.
So this biblical imagination isn't really interested in a god.
Who makes the universe and then steps back to watch what happens.
Isn't something God did.
Creation is something that God is continually doing.
Every breath,
Every heartbeat,
Every bird taking flight,
Every tree pushing roots into the earth,
Every star burning somewhere.
Beyond our ability to see it,
All of it exists because existence itself is continually a gift.
And it doesn't mean every event is caused by God in that simplistic kind of sense,
Or that God chooses every tragedy or orchestrates every accident,
But it does mean that nothing exists independently,
That nothing holds itself in being.
Everything is in some mysterious way received and maybe this is where the world begins to become what we call sacramental.
Now once you begin to see the world this way.
.
.
Ordinary life begins to look really different.
The cup in your hand,
The water inside it,
The person who made it.
The earth from which the materials the cup is made from came.
The rain,
The sun.
That long and improbable history that's resulted in you sitting exactly where you are right now,
None of those things is insignificant.
Everything's connected.
It's all contingent.
Everything is gift.
And I think this is where that deepest mistake we make is assuming that ordinary means unimportant.
Now,
Ordinary is where we live.
Ordinary is where God meets us,
The ordinary is where we become human.
So maybe holiness is found when we learn to see what is ordinary,
But we don't look through it,
If you get my gist.
There's something very earthy about my tradition,
The Benedictine tradition.
Benedictines pray a lot,
But Benedictines also eat and work and sweep and garden.
Part of the Benedictine values is hospitality.
So welcoming guests.
Part of that is also caring for the things that you have.
So washing things,
Repairing things.
Part of that is commitment to community.
So things like turning up in the right place at the right time,
Living alongside people who occasionally got on our nerves.
So,
In the rule,
St.
Benedict doesn't take life and divide it up neatly into spiritual things and everything else.
As far as Benedict is concerned,
Even the tools of the monastery are to be treated with great care.
Why?
Because nothing is disposable.
Nothing is merely just stuff.
The point is not that we think as Benedictines that the rake has a soul.
It's a little bit more subtle than that.
If everything's received as a gift,
Then how we handle anything matters.
The cup,
The book,
The garden,
The meal,
The stranger,
The person whose job that nobody notices,
The ordinary things of life,
They all become places where reverence can be practiced.
And it's important to note that because of this,
We can't think that God hides in religious places.
I mean,
Sometimes I wonder how much of our spirituality is really just an attempt to find God somewhere special.
And we do that,
Don't we?
We go on retreats,
We climb mountains,
We visit beautiful cathedrals,
We light candles,
We listen to music because it makes us feel a particular way.
And there's nothing wrong with any of those things.
Please hear me right.
Often these things can help us enter into that space where we notice.
But maybe we make the mistake of the place or the activity.
As becoming the only place.
That God can be found.
To discover that apparently God didn't come with us.
And in fact,
On some retreats,
I've been told this,
That it's gonna be hard to go back.
And continue the experience.
But what if I left that retreat or any other space with.
.
.
The frame of mind that God isn't just where I was,
That God is already back where I came from,
In the kitchen,
In the traffic,
In the office,
In the conversations with the people that I've had a hundred times,
In the person whose presence I find incredibly difficult,
In the work that's really tedious,
In the body that I'm learning how to inhabit.
Maybe the retreat or the cathedral or the music or the prayer or the practice doesn't and take us to God.
Maybe it just helps us learn to recognise the God who's been waiting for us in ordinary life all along.
And this especially matters when we step outside the natural world.
Isn't just a backdrop for human life.
Creation is a part of everything,
The tree outside your window.
It's not just there for oxygen provision and a nice photo.
It's a part of the great mystery of being itself.
It exists and that itself really should astonish us.
It really should.
The seed.
Becomes a tree.
The bird somehow knows how to migrate thousands of kilometers.
The ocean tides rise and they fall.
A human being begins as something ridiculously small and eventually learns to ask questions like the ones we're asking today.
Do you see how really strange all of this is?
And how when you sit down like this,
You can't help but enter into that moment of awe and wonder.
That's not an optional extra for the spiritual life,
But one of the ways that we learn to pray.
That wonder and awe are themselves a prayer.
And then of course,
There's people.
And this is where all of this becomes a lot more grounded and a lot less romantic.
It's easy to encounter God in the sunset,
Isn't it?
Because the sunset doesn't interrupt you very much.
And it's easier to speak about the sacredness of creation than it is to recognize the sacred dignity of the person who is annoying you right now.
And yet Jesus seems incredibly interested in directing our attention there.
The hungry,
The stranger,
The sick,
The prisoner,
The outsider,
The person.
Everyone else has learned to walk past.
God isn't just in the stuff that makes us feel spiritual.
God is often,
And is,
Where we would prefer sometimes not to look.
Which means that if we're going to say God is in all things,
We have to be prepared for God to disrupt our preferences.
Because the world is full of places where God's presence might ask something of us.
Such a day.
Don't go looking for something extraordinary.
It might be good to practice the exact opposite.
Pay attention to something that you'd normally ignore.
The cup that you're drinking from.
The tree you walk by every day.
The hands of an elderly person.
The sound of rain.
The person serving you coffee.
The bird sitting on the edge of your birdbath.
The mess on your kitchen bench.
The dog asleep in the corner.
Don't try and conjure up a spiritual experience,
Just notice.
And perhaps the little prayer you could whisper to yourself as you notice is,
This also exists in God.
It isn't God,
But just like you and I,
It's held in God.
It itself is not divine,
But gift.
It's not separate.
From the mystery,
And this is what Moses discovered.
The world wasn't suddenly filled with God when the bush began to burn.
The world was already burning with God's presence.
Moses simply turned aside.
So today.
.
.
Turn Aside.
Look again.
There may be more happening in that ordinary moment than you think there is.
And may grace,
Peace and love hold you as you sit in the ordinary and help you see beyond it,
Today and always.
Until tomorrow,
Friends.
Bye for now.
