Creation Transfigured

I will cool it with these Gilead posts at some point. I finished the book a few weeks ago, but just keep circling back around to so many of these ideas.

It has seemed to be sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance--for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. That is what I said in the Pentecost sermon. I have reflected on that sermon, and there is some truth in it. But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

One of the great glories of this book for me is how it teaches us mindfulness of the mundane, to see the beauty in the everyday, the common, even the ugly. I love how the first part of this can strike us as true--yes, this world does seem illuminated at times as if by God's special grace--but then the second part comes home as even more true as it diverges from the first. It's better than that: this world is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins "charged with the grandeur of God." It is we who are unable to see it. Obscured by our sin and grime and muck we have lost the vision that is there, the world pulsing with transfiguration and glory.