No Better Day Than Today

According to the poet Gerald Manly Hopkins, creation is “charged with the grandeur of God.” We and everything around us are infused with the Sacred. God is embedded in the consciousness of humankind. No wonder we have trouble distinguishing God from the aggregate. God is the aggregate, the sum of all things. And every time I try to sort out and define God so that I can better “understand” the wonder and the workings of the world, I fail. But I try again with the same result. There is no sermon, no lesson, no song, no movie, no book that can give me what I desire: a collegial partnership with the Principal Designer of everything. Where did we get the notion that we must “partner” with God to solve the ills of the world, the messes that we make? I don’t think a Divine-Human strategy conference is really necessary. The change we long for, the new direction, is not new at all. It is “embedded in the consciousness of humankind.” From the beginning, from the start, revealed over and over again, most completely in Nazareth’s man, the grandeur of God cannot and will not find a common denominator. It refuses to be watered-down or sanitized, which is another way of saying “compromised.” We don’t go to church or chapel or cathedral to negotiate with God. We don’t walk the path of Jesus for the exercise. We do these things because we have within our humanity the means and the methods to change the world. The day when we live what we say and do what we profess, that’s the day the wheel will slowly begin to turn in a new direction. And here’s the good news of it all: today could be the day for you and for me to become light, to become the enactment of the Prophet Micah’s words: “what is God looking for in men and women? It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, and don’t take yourself too seriously…take God seriously.” Let today be the day we stop wanting and waiting. Let this be the day we start daring and doing. “Charged with grandeur…embedded in our humanity.” Creation awaits the courage of the sons and daughters of God.