“Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.” The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
There is in spring a deep sense that all of creation is waiting, preparing to receive the changing of season. Creation patiently waiting. Creation listening with desire and expectation. Creation sensing its need and preparing to receive. Creation allowing for growth, allowing for change. We, like creation, need to allow space for the changes that come with each season of our life. We need to achieve creation’s balance and equilibrium within our soul.
All created things are marked with the signature of the Creator. To immerse oneself in creation is to enrich and enlarge one’s vision of the world. It is to see matter as the scaffolding of the Spirit and everything and everyone as created and loved by God. To come to know the God beyond us as well as the God within us is to view all of His creation as a sacrament. If we desire to grow into the person God created us to become, then the starting point is not striving after another world, but an ever deepening and maturing awareness of the true nature of this world. Our work as believers is not to separate the seen from the unseen, but to begin to reconcile the two; to hold together in our hearts concepts of the God beyond and the God within; to develop a keen sense of creation embracing and speaking to us; to endeavor to live moment by moment in the Divine Presence.
A broadened understanding of the sacramental nature of the world, as well as the sacrament of each moment lived in it, opens us to a visible place where God can be seen, known and loved through all He has made and where all things and all people can be known and loved in Him.
Jesus, my Beloved, it’s spring again.
I am Your prisoner, captured in its sweet song,
in its warmth and fragrance,
in all the Beauty new life brings.
Waves of infinite tenderness
wash over me and all of Creation.
Your Divine Look has penetrated my heart.
You only do I see.
It is my soul itself I offer Thee.
BWS