It all depends on how you look at things.
That quiet, perhaps dark, place inside can seem frightening or lonely. A place to be avoided. Our guarded parts might scramble to keep us from going there. You know the drill: grab another cup of coffee. Check out the news. Scroll through our Instagram feed. Take a walk. Pull out the remote.
But it all depends on how you look at things.
In the desert, Moses saw a bush burning. Not consumed. A curious site. From God’s perspective it was his glory bursting into the life of someone he loved, a way to get his attention, an encounter between divinity and humanity, the beginning of what would be the ongoing exodus from our places of slavery, you and I. A sign to all of us forever that God’s glory is everywhere, just below the surface of what we think we know.
It all depends on how we see things.
So that inside place that presents us with silent empty waiting, what appears to us to be the fullness of sorrow, hurt, or failure within our hearts is but a fear that comes from non-familiarity with our own reality as God’s image and likeness. Memories of deprivation projected into the future.
We forget we are that burning bush. We forget we are God’s glory. That parts of us are just not sure how to rest in this place burning with his presence, the abundant loving that waits for us to have the courage to approach, to trust. It is the invitation and the reaching out of God’s everlasting loving us. But it just looks like a bush. Like something missing in our life.
Sometimes our expectations blind us to divine action and the burning bush becomes simply another curious site we wander by.
Thomas Merton described this inner space within each of us in these words which have always felt so real and so true:
“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship.
Thomas Merton (On Christian Contemplation, page 41)
It is like a pure diamond,
blazing with the invisible light of heaven.
It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely … I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”
So when you think about your life remember, it all depends on how you look at it!
Touching the Sunrise 