Questioning

A few nights ago our world was gently illuminated by the full moon. It is not only for those young enough to still regard it as a new or unusual experience that it is an amazing sight: rather, it remains an astonishing presence in the sky for even the oldest of us; at least, I cannot imagine it being any other way.
As a small child I would have looked on it with an innocent and uneducated wonder, but I see it now with the background knowledge of what it actually is, how large, how distant, how its phases result from its orbiting around our world, and, in comparison with even the nearest planet, how relatively close to us it is. A single moment’s pause and the sight of it becomes an open gateway to the stars and to the apparently boundless immensity of the universe. There are no words to describe the fleeting combination of our own insignificance and this vastness, but that does not mean that the two superficially irreconcilable areas of awareness cannot merge into one. It is a real merging, a blending of the two into a new and greater awareness of our belonging; it is only our lack of understanding that makes the awareness an uncomfortable, disconcerting or even frightening experience. It is not like a meeting of matter and antimatter with their mutual annihilation, but a fleeting unity: a oneness with not only our Earth and everything it contains, but with the whole of creation. It is a profound beauty in the form of expanded senses of place and significance: non-specific, but more rather than less profound for that. And is this capacity for going beyond ourselves available from simply pausing to consider the ‘everyday’ in a deeper and more distant way? -From simply disconnecting our usual trains of thought and mental processes while looking at the moon? Yes, it is.

The answer is like the quiet smile on the face of a grandparent when hearing a little child’s question: the truth and the reality are too far beyond the questioner’s mind but, in time, will become a part of the adult’s life and greater awareness. As St Paul has said, ‘When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and see things as a child does, and think like a child; but now that I have become an adult, I have finished with all childish ways.’ (1 Corinthians 13:11)
The answer is ‘yes’, and in asking the question the child has reminded the listener of his or her own transition from one level of understanding to another, and then to another; and if the moments (of which standing face-to-face with the moon is an example) have been received when offered, there is no limit to the potential for our advance.

The brief tightening of the throat and inexplicable verging on tears that sometimes accompany these thoughts and feelings, were added to recently, as it struck me how well the lunar cycle portrays every possible degree of faith, of belief, of trust and of experience of the presence of God in our world and in our lives. At times the moon is plain to see, and even on a cloudy night the full moon can give light enough to filter dimly through to the ground on which we live; but it can still go unnoticed by those without the eyes to see. When even the final sliver of moon has waned into darkness, or when it is not in our portion of the sky when night has fallen, those who appreciate, who know and who believe, remain fully aware that the moon is still there; it does not have to be visibly obvious, and does not have to be seen for them to continue in their belief. Its presence, and its ability to lead us into a deeper thought and search beyond the easily recognized and the readily understood, makes it almost impossible to override the process which then leads from the far fringes of physical matter to the inner workings of creation, interconnectivity and unity. These workings include the minute detail of the physical vastness but go beyond it to the ungraspable simplicity of the eternal Greatness we call God.

Whatever we believe to be the ultimate nature of all we find out there beyond the stars, of all we see around us, and of all that goes to make the physical, intellectual and emotional beings that we are, we are here; we are in it, we are of it. We belong to it and it belongs to us; we are inseparable. Our journey must continue if we are to approach an understanding, but we are already home. We never left, but without our going away we could never return to comprehend it; and that is part of what we have been born for.
Our spiritual journeying and our seeking are embedded in our existence; they are the brightening of the inner light with which we were born: the stages of our journey are the germination, the growth and the flowering of the seed sown within our fertile ground. Our perseverance will culminate in the bearing of the fruit with which God has already graced us: we shall become the persons we were made to be.
Jesus has clearly told us, ‘So I say to you: Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; everyone who searches finds; everyone who knocks will have the door opened.’ (Luke 11:9,10)

If we believe that God exists our belief in His presence is effortless. We find no reason to believe otherwise, and have no need to pursue any search for reasons not to believe. Our belief generates an equilibrium that is dispersed through every aspect of our lives; not physically separating us from the world but, as it were, edging an inviolable membrane between us and our environment that allows us to continue living within it without being at the constant beck and call of instincts and without being slaves to our imperfect nature. It is in this way that we ‘do not belong to the world’. (John 17:16)
However we sense Him, imagine Him or believe Him to be: whether we do in fact think of God as ‘Him’, or as Her, or as It, or as something beyond any such form of classification, beyond words, and beyond identity as we understand it, the word ‘God’ is effectively the only expression available to us for the specifying of that one eternal Greatness in which we find it impossible to disbelieve.
Those who do not believe in the existence of such an entity have conjured for themselves an impermeable membrane, within which they enclose not only their entire experience of human existence, but their whole world, and every interaction between the two. They become cocooned in the undisturbed calm of the empty fortress they inhabit, insulated from what they would experience as the cold draughts of doubt and wondering, but which would include the wind of the Holy Spirit blowing into and through their lives.
‘Intellectually they are in the dark, and they are estranged from the life of God, because of the ignorance which is the consequence of closed minds.’ (Ephesians 4:18)

Even the smallest beginning of a spiritually enquiring mind, that first momentary wondering – perhaps while looking upwards to the night sky – gives access to all that made the great spiritual names of the past the men and women they became: the persons they were made to be. And that led them ultimately to the place where we all long to be.

‘Now we see only reflections in a mirror, mere riddles, but then we shall be seeing face to face. Now, I can know only imperfectly; but then I shall know just as fully as I am myself known.’ (1 Corinthians 13:12)