Parousia by Kevin Beck

Hope you don't mind Kevin but this really spoke to me.


Parousia
March 19, 2007
By Kevin A. Beck


Listen Closely

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
--Psalm 19

The Psalmist looked at the world and did not see a fallen place in need of reclamation. He didn’t believe that the earth required remaking in order to announce the glory of God. Instead, David looked up and saw the hand of God in all things. He opened his ears and heard the voice of God in every sound. God had not left the building. God was intimately immanent everywhere.

From his perspective, the apostle Paul affirms this ancient Hebrew belief in his own way. He wrote that there “is one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4).

The belief that the world is an inherently corrupt place hinders us from recognizing our daily encounters with God. It causes us to turn our eyes away from the natural world and look for God elsewhere in an ethereal realm of our own creating. If you want to find God, we suppose, visit God in a building that we call the “house of God.” There you can hear God’s music and listen to someone speak God’s message in a twenty-minute sound bite. Maybe you can even greet someone with a holy handshake while you breathe in the aroma of artificially cooled or heated air.

It’s time that we went outside. You don’t have to be a druid to experience God in the crackling leaves. The crashing waves, rolling hills, and verdant flora all announce the presence of the divine.

I knew a woman named Jessie, and she loved to tend to her flower garden. She told me that touching the soil, seeing the plants, and smelling the aromas were the times she felt closest to God. You don’t have to grow a garden to know the outside world hymns God to our hearts. You’ve probably witnessed a sunset that brought tears to your eyes as the curtains were pulled back and you entered into the numinous.

Perhaps it is because we live in an ever-increasing urbanized world that we have lost a collective sense of natural holiness. Industrialization and the demands of the modern world force us indoors where we decorate with plastic plants. We plug in our lamps that provide artificial sunlight instead of going outside to feel God’s sun shine on the just and the unjust. We filter our water because of pollutants we’ve dumped into the streams. We take loads of allergy medications because of the particular matter we’ve pumped into the air. In losing our ecological heritage, we lose a deeper sense of God.

The fourteenth century English spiritual writer, Julian of Norwich, experienced God while contemplating something as small as a hazelnut. She observed: "In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought "What may this be?" And it was generally answered thus: "It is all that is made." I marveled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it."

To revitalize your spiritual connection to the planet, go outside. Visit a park, go on a hike, plant some greenery, or look up at night and view the stars. Feel the breeze, the sun, the water. Smell the blooming flowers or the changing leaves. Listen to the birdsong. In just a few days, the seasons will transform—to Spring in the northern hemisphere and to Autumn in the South. This brilliant time of year can be the perfect occasion for you to witness the glory of God, to view God’s handiwork, and to hear divine speech uttered through all the earth and beyond.