substituting for—yet surely longing for—in-depth experience of God or the
Infinite.
The essential Gospel of God’s loving union with all of creation from the
beginning was seldom believed—and usually actively denied or ignored by most
clergy. One wonders, and I do not mean this cynically, if it had a lot to do with
job security. We clergy were the needed mediators and salesmen in the other
three worldviews, but not so much in the incarnational view. Thus most clergy
do not see nature as the “First Bible” but emphasize the much later version,
written in the last nanosecond of geological time and then called the only word
of God. Yet those very Scriptures say that the “Word” was “from the beginning”
(John 1:1) and that Word was always identified with “Christ”—which in time
“became flesh and lived among us” (1:14). St. Bonaventure believed that every
creature is a word of God, and this was the first book of “the Bible.”*
If my underlying thesis in this book is true and Christ is a word for the Big
Story Line of history, then the incarnational worldview held maturely is
precisely the Good News!
You do not need to name this universal manifestation “Christ,” however, to
fully live inside of it and enjoy its immense fruits.
- Bonaventure, Breviloquium 2, 5.1, 2, ed. Dominic V. Monti, O.F.M. Collected Works of St.
Bonaventure (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 2005), 72–73.