else. This is what we saw in Caryll Houselander’s experience on the train, and in
Jesus when he pointed to divinity in “the least of the brothers and sisters”
(Matthew 25:40) and even in the so-called bad thief who was crucified next to
him (Luke 23:43). Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and
never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not
include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you
transcend your small ego, the more you can include. “Unless the single grain of
wheat dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it does, it will bear much fruit,”
Jesus Christ says (John 12:24).
When you look your dog in the face, for example, as I often looked at my
black Labrador, Venus, I truly believe you are seeing another incarnation of the
Divine Presence, the Christ. When you look at any other person, a flower, a
honeybee, a mountain—anything—you are seeing the incarnation of God’s love
for you and the universe you call home.
Pause to focus on an incarnation of God’s love apparent near you right now.
You must risk it!
I hope a larger understanding is dawning for you. Anything that draws you
out of yourself in a positive way—for all practical purposes—is operating as God
for you at that moment. How else can the journey begin? How else are you
drawn forward, now not by idle beliefs but by inner aliveness? God needs
something to seduce you out and beyond yourself, so God uses three things in
particular: goodness, truth, and beauty. All three have the capacity to draw us
into an experience of union.
You cannot think your way into this kind of radiant, expansive seeing. You
must be caught in a relationship of love and awe now and then, and it often
comes slowly, through osmosis, imitation, resonance, contemplation, and
mirroring. The Christ is always given freely, tossed like a baton from the other
side. Our only part in the process is to reach out and catch it every now and
then.
For Paul and for ordinary mystics like you and me, the kind of seeing I’m
describing is a relational and reciprocal experience, in which we find God
simultaneously in ourselves and in the outer world beyond ourselves. I doubt if
there is any other way. Presence is never self-generated, but always a gift from
another, and faith is always relational at the core. Divine seeing cannot be done
alone, but only as one consciousness interfaces with another, and the two
parties volley back and forth, meeting subject to subject. Presence must be
offered and given, evoked and received. It can happen in a physical gesture, a