"Every Common Bush Alive with God"
- along a wilderness trail -
On this weekend before the season of Lent begins, many
Christian churches will tell the well-known story of the “Transfiguration.”
According to this narrative, before going to Jerusalem to face his ultimate betrayal
and death on a cross, Jesus takes some of his disciples up to a high mountain peak
where they see him “glowing” with the brilliant light of divine energy.
Nowadays non-believers scoff at the story as being little
more than a magical fairy tale told to children; and, even for believers, if
you take the story too literally it’s kind of hard to believe it actually
happened - after all none of us has ever seen someone glow. Or have we?
In some sense everyone has a “spark of God” aglow in them
and everything that "is" radiates a divine energy but most of the time we don’t recognize
it – our hearts are too hard, our minds to clouded and distracted. In a very real sense, the story of the
Transfiguration is also a story about those disciples who accompanied Jesus up
the mountain who woke up from their spiritual sleep and became alert and awake
enough to see the light of “God” shining in the face of Jesus. The story of the
Transfiguration invites any one of us an any type of spiritual path to wake up
to the the radiant energy of “God” glowing everywhere in our midst.
Most every day I find myself hiking out into the wilderness area
around our house. On my walk yesterday I was struck with the awareness that the
dry, desert soil and the rock-covered mountains had almost overnight burst into
a bright array of excruciatingly beautiful spring wildflowers, bright yellow
blossoms on the desert trees and bushes, exotic flowers pushing their way
through the tough skin of thorny cacti. All throughout the winter months I
walked along those trails and everything appeared to be so dead and so dry but
everything was actually very much alive – I just failed to see it.
This springtime (and in this upcoming Lenten season) I am
reminded that the radiant energy of “God” glows beneath the surface of everyone
and everything, all the time. So this is a season for spiritually waking up to it all.
The whole experience reminded me of a verse of one of my
very favorite poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush alive with
God
But only he who sees takes off
his shoes
The rest sit around and pluck
blackberries
As I see it, all of us are always walking along life-paths
that are vibrantly "alive with God.” At
work, at school, in the supermarket, in our kitchen cooking dinner, sitting in
the local Starbucks, walking on on a city street, on a trail in a desert
wilderness on a glorious spring day -
every place we ever stand is “a Transfiguration” mountaintop where the
glory/energy of “God” is always radiantly glowing if we are willing to pay attention.
I also wonder if some people are unaware that every place we stand is a holy
place glowing with divinity because we only expect a church, a temple of a
mosque to be sacred ground.
I am reminded of one of my favorite pieces of wisdom I once
came across in one of my Buddhist magazines:
Whatever we are looking for is
already right here,
the problem is that we are
usually elsewhere.
When we pay attention to our
everyday life
we always discover something truly
wonderful.
For me, this story of the Transfiguration is told each year
as the season of Lent begins as a reminder to exercise the muscles of my
spiritual awareness and look for “God” aglow in every step I take. During the upcoming
Lenten season I want to more intentionally “take off my shoes” wherever I may go
because I am always standing on Holy Ground.
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