Can you see it? These are tern eggs camouflaged on beach pebbles. We can say God protects, yes, but God also plays. God delights! Remember the astronomer who began a presentation to his colleagues by asking, "What imagination thought of the trillion, trillion galaxies?" Maybe that's who God is: God is all-imagination.
And the Genesis story recounts that we have God breath in us - sharing God's creative imagination, indeed, that we are an expression of this Imagination. It's very wonderful: that we are this close to God!
And the Genesis story recounts that we have God breath in us - sharing God's creative imagination, indeed, that we are an expression of this Imagination. It's very wonderful: that we are this close to God!
But we forget this very quickly, expecting the others will be just like me in beliefs and values, even faith. We're not exact copies of some original master piece, but God's grace (which is God's shared energies) evolves and grows us each uniquely. It would be a peaceful world, you know, if we really believed and lived that.
It's a disaster when that personal evolution is thwarted or denied. I'm thinking of friends who went to Romania where orphanages are filled with infants and toddlers born to drug addicted women. And these children can't let go of the kind people who've traveled just to lift and hold them, so the baby can experience and be grown by human touch.
I was talking with a newly ordained Orthodox priest yesterday whose four year old child happily attends a Montessori school. The Montessori method is not to pack in but to draw out the divinely imagined and God-sparked person within each of us. But truth be told, things can go very wrong. What's happened along the life-way to the white-supremacists who recently came with knives expecting to meet protesters at their rally?
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| Miss Gaunt played by Georgine Anderson |
There are Christians who see it as their mission to detect sin, like Miss Gaunt, played by Georgine Anderson, in the 1978 Geraldine McEwan TV series, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. They miss sharing the play and delighted imagination of God, who takes a moment in creating each human person, and who Christ loves in his Resurrection breathing.
"And with that he breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" John 20:22
"And with that he breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.'" John 20:22
