What a treasure this life is!
Every second belongs to eternity.
Make me, O Lord, at last, a simple thing
Time cannot overwhelm.
Once I transcended time
A bud broke to a rose.
And I rose from a last diminishing.
"YHWH."It is the Name that by tradition we are forbidden to pronounce. Free yourself, I thought. Pronounce it. With no vowels, it came out: "Yyyyhhhhwwwwhhh." It sounded like breath. God's Name: the breath of life! No words, just the whispering, murmuring sound of a deep-drawn breath. For years I took delight in this discovery It hanged the way I prayed.Yet the hart of what had moved me I still had not discovered. I did not know it was my mother's breath I yearned for. For my mother to breathe easy once again, to draw once more a deep and even breath – that would be God for me. For each of us I realized, the deepest Name of God arises from the depths of our own life.
Unless we are creators, we are not fully alive . . . Remember, the root word of humble and human is the same: humus: earth. We are dust. We are created; it is God who made us and not we ourselves. But we were made to be co-creators with our maker.
We are not victims. We are not guests. You and I are colleagues and co-creators with God—living in the midst of ongoing creation and called upon to celebrate everything that is.
Reality is permeated, indeed flooded, with divine creativity, nourishment, and care.
Creativity is a spiritual force. The force that drives the green fuse through the flower, as Dylan Thomas defined his idea of the life force, is the same urge that drives us toward creation. There is a central will to create that is part of our human heritage and potential. Because creation is always an act of faith, and faith is a spiritual issue, so is creativity. As we strive for our highest selves, our spiritual selves, we cannot help but be more aware, more proactive, and more creative.
Just as God speaks to us through the words of scripture, so God speaks to us through the elements of creation. The cosmos is like a living sacred text that we can learn to read and interpret. Just as we prayerfully ponder the words of the Bible in Christian practice, and as other traditions study their sacred texts, so we are invited to listen to the life of creation as an ongoing, living utterance of God.
God is creatively present in everyone in every moment whether we are aware of it or not. But when we are in the state of silent gratefulness, we are aware of God's Presence.
Every artistic creation is an attempt to recover something of the original sense of order, of right proportion. Our capacity for wonder, for awe, our sense of the magical and the sacred, has its source here—in what we can call a state of grace, equilibrium. I suppose that what we refer to as sacred is so because of some primal relation between ourselves and the world. We feel that a part of our being is hallowed or blessed by this, that some acts of ours enhance this feeling, while others violate it.