Brian’s Reflection: Monday, September 27, 2010

The heart of [persons] is, so to speak, the paradise of God.

Alphonsus Liguori, “saint” of the Roman Catholic
religion, born on this date, 1696, at Marianella,
near Naples [brackets mine]


Metaphorically, I think of the Big Bang, by which the Universe we presently comprehend came into being, (without any need of “God” as Stephen Hawking says in his new book which I am reading, since – my take - God is a greater and older Mystery than this present Universe-among-many) ….. I think of the BB as the Heart of God, so densely compact with Compassion that it must blast out to shape a new Universe!! For, as Fr. James Huntington OHC said, “Love must act as Light must shine and Fire must burn”. And here we – you and I - are in it, flying through Space and Time on our Little Blue Planet, chasing Divine Compassion, breathlessly trying to catch up!

Thinking about the vastness of the Universe takes one’s breath away. And to think with humility that we are but specks in It, whirling about our Sun in a remote corner of the spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy! But that does not diminish either our sense of our own nature as atoms of that Divine Compassion, or our sense of destiny to plant the seeds of that Divine Compassion wherever we are flung. Oh, the places to which we are flung, willy-nilly, by Life! Yet wherever we land is fertile ground for that cast seed which Jesus mentions in His lovely parable. It matters not where we land; good soil or bad, we can blossom into the flowers of Compassion, be it for a day or for a Season, small harvest or large.

“God” is a vast and unknown Mystery, more vast than any of us can describe or voice. Once every passionate heart and every brilliant mind has spoken, the Mystery has been only remotely touched. But it is enough. It is enough.

And to think that the vastness of that Mystery lives in your heart and in mine and in every human heart! That your heart and mine is the “paradise of God”. Where God walks in the cool of the day and sits to talk with us.

Jesus said that “this day” had enough trouble of its own. True. Worry not about tomorrow. Blossom with Compassion wherever today takes you. As the parable of the Talents reminds us, we have only to use what we have, little or much. Nothing else is required.

Brian+