Tag: abundance of God

Irreducible Clarity

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If that’s what he means,’ says the student to the poetry teacher, ‘why doesn’t he just say it?’
‘If God is real,’ says the parishioner to the preacher, ‘why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?’
The questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance,
but their answers are similar.
A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense
means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight;
it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity.
A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it,
though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive.
Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor,
which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths.
Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image,
which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.
~Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

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An Advent Tapestry–Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God

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The Nativity by Arthur Hughes

The God We Hardly Knew
by Archbishop Oscar Romero

No one can celebrate
a genuine Christmas
without being truly poor.
The self-sufficient, the proud,
those who, because they have
everything, look down on others,
those who have no need
even of God- for them there
will be no Christmas.
Only the poor, the hungry,
those who need someone
to come on their behalf,
will have that someone.
That someone is God.
Emmanuel. God-with-us.
Without poverty of spirit
there can be no abundance of God.

 

No one wants to admit to being needy.  It is, after all, allowing someone else to have strength and power to deliver what one is desperate for.  Relinquishing that control is painful but it is more painful to be so poor that one is hungry without food, thirsty without drink, ill without medicine,  cold without shelter,  alone without God.

When we are well fed and hydrated, healed, clothed and safe in our homes, it is difficult to be considered “needy”.  Yet most of us are ultimately bereft and spiritually impoverished, needing God even when we won’t admit it, or reject Him.

Despite the wealth with which we surround ourselves every day, our need is still great; we stand empty and ready to be filled–abundantly.