On revelation, the power and the glory

I close my eyes and open myself, my inner self, so that all is in tune with the universe, the music of the spheres as they rotate through the heavens, the vast expanse of being, the electrodes swirling around the atoms, millions upon millions to make up space smaller than vision. The feeling of falling strikes, as flights of fancy reel the mind. Is God here? Can the Power and the Glory be seen within the infinite space that is the human conscience?

Through memory and time our great church father, Augustine of Hippo, sought God. Is revelation of God possible? Karl Barth taught that only through Jesus Christ is revelation of God made known, and now, because of that knowledge, one can see the revelation of God in the world. The fingerprints of God are in all of creation. Can one see these without knowing the revelation of God contained wholly present in the man Jesus Christ?

Annie Dillard said that each day is a god. I say every breath, inhaled and exhaled, is a god for it contains the mystery of the divine. God is within and without, God is here and not. God created all in God's own very image, so that all one needs to experience the presence of God is to experience the presence in communal relationship, to see and feel God is to see the face of one another, to feel the interrelational emotions between oneself and all of creation. But God is so much more! These are but the shadows of God cast into our vision. To see the true God, to reach beyond the world and to touch upon the veil, to look beyond, is impossible. To look beyond that glass through which we can only see dimly dark shadows of the truth--it is unthinkable, unknowable, and certainly intangible.

But what Paul, along with Luther, taught us is that God was made fully present through Christ, fully known through the suffering of a man who died upon a cross two thousand years ago. And by that death on the cross, Jesus promised to be known through our own suffering. In the tears and pain and heartbrake that clutters all of our lives, we know that Christ is truly present. The Gospel of Thomas states thate if we were to just look under a rock, to split a branch in two, Christ--God--would be there. Because of the revelation of God in Christ Jesus we have no farther to look then in the eyes and hopes and dreams, the flights of fancy that accent our lives, to see the revelation of the Power and the Glory. Alleluiah!

Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,
Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Pax et bonum,
JKW +