A Reflection for Monday of the Nineteenth Week in Abnormal Time
“As I looked, a stormwind got here from the North,
an enormous cloud with flashing fire enveloped in brightness,
from the midst of which (the midst of the fireplace)
something gleamed like electrum.” (Ezekiel 1:4)
In 2019 I spent a semester training to be a spiritual director on the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Other than the prospect to soak up the a long time of experience delivered to the classroom by the 2 instructors, my favorite thing about every day’s class was hearing about my classmates’ experiences of God.
With students from all around the world and at different stages of life, each religious and lay, there have been wildly different encounters to interrupt open and discuss. I especially loved sitting with classmates who were women religious from South Korea and Uganda, and hearing their experiences of God so enriched by the cultures of their home countries, but still universal enough to make sense to their Californian classmate.
The prophet Ezekiel, writing from exile, has a visionary, mystical experience of God. From his exile in Babylon, Ezekiel’s vision of YHWH may not seem logical to modern readers, but what vision of God makes any sort of logical sense? From Julian of Norwich’s vision of God holding a universe the dimensions of a hazelnut, to the Jesuit who once told me he suspected God moonlights as a get up comic, to a friend’s explanation that he sees God within the wizened faces of elderly women, to Ezekiel’s own flaming vision, nobody’s idea of God is strictly similar to one other person’s.
Jesus’ own use of metaphors, parables and other creative imaginings lets us know that we have now permission to assume a God who’s as expansive as possible inside the infinite scope of our imaginations.
In 1877, Gerard Manley Hopkins, studying to turn into a Jesuit, sent his mother a sonnet he’d written “in a freak the opposite day.” Hopkins wrote that “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./ It’s going to flame out, like shining from shook foil.” Does this make logical sense? No. I’ve the truth is heard many individuals complain that they “don’t get” Hopkins. But his own vision of God as “the dearest freshness deep down things” that “morning, on the brown brink eastward, springs” is deeply akin to Ezekiel’s own “bow that appears within the clouds on a rainy day.” We don’t need to grasp “shook foil” to know that Hopkins is talking about God’s radiant light, nor do we’d like to see God seated on a sapphire throne surrounded by flaming angels to grasp Ezekiel telling us that God is so magnificent and so large and incomprehensible so, sure, why not?
This is probably the proper attitude toward encountering God. In nature? Sure, why not. In music and art and architecture? Sure, why not. Within the written word? Sure, why not. In other people? Sure, why not. And as to other people’s visions and imaginings of God, Jesus’ own use of metaphors, parables and other creative imaginings lets us know that we have now permission to assume a God who’s as expansive as possible inside the infinite scope of our imaginations.
