In the Stained Glass Presence of Gratitude and Grace

IN THE STAINED GLASS PRESENCE OF GRATITUDE & GRACE Scientists say that Galaxy M31 is “a place of miracles”, two hundred thousand light years wide and one hundred thousand light years high! They say the Rose Galaxies, ARP 237, are a different kind of miracle – the shape of the flower slowly evolving as a smaller galaxy is gradually lengthened by the swirling forces of a much larger galaxy it is currently passing through To the mind that is human, flawed as it is, nothing can come from nothing, and nothing in a universe perpetually engaged in evolution, transition, metamorphosis and decay is ever reduced to a state of material extinction! So let us accept that in the beginning it was “God” that created the heavens and the earth – a big bang gesture launching all manner of geology and gasses, of fires and ices, the physics of gravity, the chemistries of hydrogen, oxygen and volatile life perpetually expanding with the velocity of light; the circular kinetics of rotation and orbit, the pyro-dynamics of black hole and star birth and galactic extension; explosive, intriguing, provocative displays from an enigmatic essence impossible to ignore! Was it an arrogant maneuver in a minute of pique? A nervous reaction to the oppressive silence of the empty and the vast? Perhaps a simple attempt to make a moment more interesting that got more exciting the more it got out of hand? And here we all are on a small blue planet, whirling and wobbling, unworthy and wealthy, fighting the seductions of righteous entitlement and the frightening complexities of our sentient and self-conscious lives, struggling to become the responsible stewards of a sacred anomaly, a Gaian intelligence that allows us to be, and be aware that we are, if for only a moment, in an exquisitely intricate manifestation of “God” – not the Abrahamic “God”, whose scriptural domains are the Judean, the Sinai, the Arabian deserts, the well-guarded routes toward heaven and hell, the rigid regimes of rituals and rules, and the demeaning demands for worship or worse, but a different divinity, an infinite, eternal, transcendent existence whose awesome theatrics and silent poetics are the essence and soul of all that there is, who simultaneously, somehow, without Tanakh or Torah, Bible or Koran, is the “God” of my wants, the “God” of my needs, the stained glass presence of morning and evening and morning again and the gratitude and grace they inspire! It is the source of my wonder, the source of my awe, the One who in quietly calling my name says “Be still and know that I am!”