Winter and Life

“For the mood of the winter sea, read Joseph Conrad‘s description:

‘The greyness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before light itself.’

But the symbols of hope are not lacking even in the grayness and bleakness of the winter sea.  On land we know that the apparent lifelessness of winter is an illusion.  Look closely at the bare branches of a tree, on which not the palest gleam of green can be discerned.  Yet, spaced along each branch are the leaf buds, all the spring’s magic of swelling green concealed and safely preserved under the insulating, overlapping layers. 

Pick off a piece of the rough bark of the trunk; there you will find hibernating insects.  Dig down through the snow into the earth.  There are the eggs of next summer’s grasshoppers; there are the dormant seeds from which will come the grass, the herb, the oak tree.”  (Rachel Carson, THE OXFORD BOOK OF MODERN SCIENCE WRITING, pp 136-137)

Creation Involves Risk

I appreciated the comment in the New York Times op-ed, “Every Moment With My Son Is an Act of Creation”  by Viet Thanh Nguyen

“There is no creativity, or creation, including the making and raising of children, that comes without risk. I now understand what I never did as a child: that I was the product of my parents taking a risk. The risk that their gift of love would be rejected; the risk that they would be misunderstood; the risk that their creation would have a life of his own.”

That risk that parents take when deciding to have children appears to have been experienced by God in bringing humans into existence.

And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.   (Genesis 6:6)

... the LORD said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.   (Genesis 8:21)

It may seem wrong for us to imagine that God took a risk in creating humans – after all God is omniscient and omnipotent.  Yet, in bestowing free will on humans, God was taking a risk – and allowing choice, uncertainty, ambiguity to be part of rational creation.  God gave humans free will – with consequences.  God did not predetermine everything, but rather watched to see His creation unfold in unexpected ways.   We see the same thing in  physics, for in creating a universe with quantum mechanics, God builds into creation some indeterminacy, some probability, some unknowingness, some chance.  By allowing mutations to occur within the genetic process of producing DNA, God allowed change into all living beings.  And then there is humanity with its free will.   We see this being enacted in Genesis 2 when Adam is given the task of naming the animals.  God watches to see what the human will decide is the name of each animal.  God doesn’t predetermine this naming, but watches and seems to enjoy the creativity which the free-willed human exhibits in creating new and unexpected names for the animals.  Creative genius can unexpectedly change the world, but so can changes in the genetic process, and the natural working out of the laws of physics.  So many things happen naturally everyday for which we are not able to see or even anticipate their consequences.

So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.   (Genesis 2:19)

 

Thanksgiving (2019)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Since this is a great American holiday, here is a poem from a great American Poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar.

A THANKSGIVING POEM

The sun hath shed its kindly light,

Our harvesting is gladly o’er

Our fields have felt no killing blight,

Our bins are filled with goodly store.

From pestilence, fire, flood, and sword

We have been spared by thy decree,

And now with humble hearts, O Lord,

We come to pay our thanks to thee.

We feel that had our merits been

The measure of thy gifts to us,

We erring children, born of sin,

Might not now be rejoicing thus.

No deed of ours hath brought us grace;

When thou were nigh our sight was dull,

We hid in trembling from thy face,

But thou, O God, wert merciful.

Thy mighty hand o’er all the land

Hath still been open to bestow

Those blessings which our wants demand

From heaven, whence all blessings flow.

Thou hast, with ever watchful eye,

Looked down on us with holy care,

And from thy storehouse in the sky

Hast scattered plenty everywhere.

Then lift we up our songs of praise To thee,

O Father, good and kind;

To thee we consecrate our days;

Be thine the temple of each mind.

With incense sweet our thanks ascend;

Before thy works our powers pall;

Though we should strive years without end,

We could not thank thee for them all.

(The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar,  Kindle Location 6676-6691)

Orthodox Theology and Quantum Theory (III)

This is the 3^rd and final post in this series building on the ideas that John Breck put into his book, BEYOND THESE HORIZONS: QUANTUM THEORY AND CHRISTIAN FAITH.  Breck begins a much needed dialogue between Orthodox theology, quantum theory and a theory of consciousness, attempting to fill a void that exists between Orthodox theology and modern science and philosophy.  The previous post is Quantum Theory and Orthodox Theology (II).   Quantum physics presents to us truth about the empirical world which may open a door for a dialogue between scientific theory and Orthodox theology by adding a dimension to Orthodox thinking.  Orthodoxy historically formed a great synthesis between theology and the dominant ideas from Hellenic culture.  Now Orthodoxy begins to speak to the world of scientific materialism by using concepts which quantum thinking has brought to light about the material world.

Breck points out that physicists recognize that “…two entangled photons behave as a single unity…. the interaction between the two renders them independent of time and free from the influence of ‘local’ or immediately surrounding conditions.” (BTH, p 122)   If physical reality can be free of time and locality, why is it impossible to accept a being, namely God, which is also free of these constraints?  It seems to me that quantum discoveries have opened a door to allow scientists to accept an immaterial/spiritual world since immaterial ‘things’ exist in the materialistic world of science!  The material world at the quantum level reveals that it behaves both like matter and like a wave.  Fields underlie the existence of everything, indicating an immaterial basis for reality.  This opens the possibility of bringing quantum physics to bear upon spiritual topics.

For example, if one wonders how the person of Jesus can somehow miraculously convey salvation to all, we can think about entanglement in the quantum world.  “Entanglement permits the instantaneous communication of information from one quantum element to another…” (BTH, p 122).   Salvation can be understood as information that is being conveyed from the incarnate Christ to all of the other elements of the universe.  Our bodies share a common existence with the rest of the universe and salvation is a cosmic event touching all that exists.  It turns out that the entire cosmos is entangled with the Creator and Savior God.  God shows that divinity can become incarnate (God becomes “not God”) as creation and Creator interface and blur all lines of separation.   The concept of theosis shows creation is capable of being united to divinity.

Breck himself takes this notion of the shared common existence of all things and sees the hologram as offering a scientific paradigm or even an explanation for several theological claims.  The way in which a hologram works is already present in the universe as understood by Orthodox theology.  “The world is a Whole; everything is interconnected.  Like a hologram, every part and aspect of the world contains the whole of everything”  (BTH, p 93).  This becomes obvious in the writings of St Maximus the Confessor for whom both “…Scripture and the universe should be contemplated as a [hu]man ” (Lars Thunberg, MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 74).   The whole is contained in the part and the part in the whole, this is how the hologram forms its image.  The human is a microcosm of the universe.  So, if we come to understand the human we can come to understand the universe, but not only the universe but also the Scriptures, for each contains the other and is interconnected.

Lars Thunberg explains: “Here the Pauline trichotomy (St Paul speaks of man as consisting of body, soul, and spirit) is also inscribed in the system.  This means that the Church as a building is now seen as divided into three parts, organized according to their sacredness: to the spirit corresponds the altar, to the soul the sanctuary, and to the body the nave.  But what is important for Maximus is precisely the reciprocity between them: the Church reflects man in his constitution as the latter reflects and represents the Church in man.  Man is in fact a church in the world, and the Church is universal Man, what Maximus calls the makranthropos.” (MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 122)  If we look at the universe/Cosmos as a whole we will see how it reveals the human to us, and so too the human reveals the cosmos.  The Church also reflects the human and the human the church.  All are interconnected, revealing each other and each containing a revelation about the other.  This is where quantum physics opens the Church to science and the scientific way of understanding the world.  The quantum world and the experienced world come together in Christ.  The science of the hologram makes the theological claims of Maximus even more clear to us.

As St Maximus says:

“The Logos, God by essence, became man and messenger of the divine will.  He let the most intimate ground of the goodness of the Father appear, if one may say so, and showed in Himself the goal for which created beings were created.  For it is for Christ, i.e. for the Christic mystery, that all time and all that is in time has received in Christ its beginning and its end.  The union between the determined and the indetermined, the finite and the infinite, the limited and the non-limited, and also between Creator and creature, between rest and movement was conceived before the times.” (Maximus in MAN AND THE COSMOS, p 79)

For Christians, it is in Christ that the quantum world and the experienced world interface and are united.  In Christ the beginning and the end, the spiritual and the physical, heaven and earth, the living and the dead, the finite and infinite, divinity and humanity, Creator and creation are united and understood.  The theory of everything so sought out by science will fall short until it recognizes something beyond mathematics unites all things.

The Faces of the Flock

“And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so.

And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ”   (Genesis 1:24-25)

Genesis mentions God created the birds of the air, but there are also birds of the ground whose creation is not mentioned in the beginning of the Bible.  But then the Bible does not mention everything that exists, and in fact does not tell us everything we can know about creation.

“So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the human to see what he would call them; and whatever the human called every living creature, that was its name. The human gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field…”  (Genesis 2:19-20)

According to Genesis, Adam got to name the animals and God who created the animals seems to have been interested in seeing what names the human might create for these newly formed creatures.  Was Adam more of the “Indian rhinoceros” mind or of the “Rhinoceros unicornis” mind or of the “greater one-horned rhinoceros” mind?  The Bible again doesn’t tell us, so we can imagine what we like.    Did he think “scimitar horned oryx” or was he more of a “Oryx dammah”  man?  “Sichuan takin” or “Budorcas taxicolor tibetana“?  God found joy and goodness not only in the animals God created but also in this human and in the names Adam created for God’s animals.   Humans were created to be creative – to share in God’s joy and to give God joy.

Genesis 30:40 mentions “the faces of the flock” which Jacob cleverly uses to take advantage of his deceptive father-in-law Laban.   I think God’s flocks include all the animals God has made on earth – some of their faces are below:

All of the photos were taken in September 2019 at The Wilds of Ohio as I took time to visit and see the animals in the wild, though not in their native lands.  All look to God wherever they may be.

You can see all my photos from my 2 hour visit at The Wilds 2019 Photos.

A Life-giving Myth (II)

This is the 2nd post in this series based on the short story, “A Life-giving Myth, ” by Fr John Breck from his book, THE LONG JOURNEY HOME.  The first post is A Life-giving Myth (I).  The story is basically a lecture given by a college professor which offers some profound insights into the nature of Christian thinking and theology.  Breck argues in the story that there is a good and proper understanding of “myth” which is helpful for the Christian to know when reading Scripture.  Myth doesn’t mean fantasy or fiction, but is rather offering theology in narrative to help reveal the mystery of God.  “Myth” opens our heart and mind and the Scriptures to the truth which is being revealed to us in a language which helps get us beyond human limitations – which is made possible through art (icons), poetry (hymns), symbol and ritual.  So in the story, the professor lectures:

“People usually read the Bible as though it were a history book or a scientific account that details how God created the world (‘in six days,’ as bad exegesis would have it); how he chose and delivered the Hebrew people from an implacably hostile world; sent his Son from heaven to dwell as a man among men; tolerated his Son’s crucifixion as a vicarious death that frees us from the consequences of our personal sin, and by his ‘descent into hell’ destroyed the power of death; then raised his Son from the tomb and exalted him into heaven, a location conceived as somewhere ‘up there’ or ‘out there.’  These are the basic elements of God’s saving work, presented in Scripture and interpreted in various ways of preachers and teachers in our churches and seminaries.  The faith of most of us is shaped by these traditional elements, whether or not we accept them as ‘fact.'”  (pp 219-220)

The story’s professor says if we want to understand Scripture we have to be prepared to understand myth – how the narrative takes us to a deeper level and meaning.  For example, Old Testament narratives reveal Christ to us.  If we read the Old Testament only as history, we miss its point.  The texts are pointing beyond their literal meaning to the Kingdom of God, to Christ, to the Holy Trinity and to the eschaton in which Christ is revealed to all.  A purely literal reading of the text will cause us to miss the depths of what God is revealing about history and about creation and about what it means to be human.  Genesis is not trying to offer a scientific explanation of creation since in the modern understanding of “science” since science really only considers materialism whereas Genesis is offering a spiritual understanding of the empirical universe.

The story’s lecturer continues:

“This kind of perspective has also influenced – and deformed – our understanding of miracles.  Rather than receive them as ‘signs’ of the presence of the Kingdom of God within the world, we see them as exceptional occurrences that suspend or otherwise defy natural law.  In working miracles, we think, God breaks the rules to perform some extraordinary exploit that we request or that  he sees as necessary for the spiritual progress and enlightenment of his people.” (p 220)

Scriptural miracles are showing us that our world has an interface with the transcendent, with the divine, with all that is holy and glorious, with all that God is revealing to us.  If we only seek out the “magic” of the miraculous (defying nature), we fail to see the miracles are revealing God to us.  We end up caring more about the gift than the Giver of every good and perfect gift.  Miracles are a potential window into heaven, into paradise, where we can see God.  For Breck’s professor, what we need is to have revived in our hearts and minds a godly sense of myth, to help us see beyond the literal.  The empirical world can be studied by science because of its predictability and the laws of nature which govern the physical world.  The miraculous is not mostly a breaking of the laws of science as it is the breaking into the empirical world by transcendence.  We come to realize something more than the material world actually exists.  That’s what miracles do, but sadly and too often we try to change them into magic, a way in which we believe we can control these mysterious powers.  Just as quantum mechanics has revealed the empirical world is not fully grasped by Newtonian physics, so too Christianity points out there is mystery fully present in the empirical world.  And for many scientifically trained people the very problem with miracles is it leads people to want to practice magic to control things, and for them that reduces miracles to mere superstition as they don’t believe nature can be controlled by magic.

“A good example of mythological imagery is provided by the Exodus tradition.  This foundational experience in Israel’s history is recounted in different versions by the author of the book of Exodus and by the psalmist.  In both, cases, the Exodus from Egypt can be fully understood only as a typological myth, a pre-figuration of the deliverance of God’s people from captivity and death to freedom and eternal life.  As a literary trope it unites the two Testaments – Old and New, First and Second – so thoroughly that the Church Fathers could only conceive of the Bible as a diptych: two complementary panels that are self-referential and completely interdependent.  The major bond between the two Testaments is precisely ‘myth’: the unifying story of Israel’s call and saving vocation, fulfilled in the incarnation and saving mission of the Son of God.”  (p 222)

The Old Testament reveals the New, and the New  Testament is foreshadowed in the Old.  The narrative of the Old Testament prepares us from the events of the New, and the New Testament reveals the meaning of the Old.  “Myth” here is not fiction, but the narrative which ties together not only the two Covenants, Old and New, but also heaven and earth, the spiritual and physical, the living and the dead, Creator and creation, humanity and the world, sentience and inanimate, consciousness and existence.

“This explains the reason why the first chapter of Genesis must be read symbolically.  Its purpose is not to reveal historical fact.  It is to affirm that the one true God is Creator and Lord of all things in heaven and on earth, things he has delivered into the hands of those created in his own ‘image’ and ‘likeness.’  It’s pointless, therefore, to look for scientific confirmation of the creation events as Genesis describes them.  If for example, the account declares that the sun and the moon were created after the earth and its vegetation, it is primarily to counter worship of the sun by Israel’s pagan neighbors.  The author of the account never intended for it to be read as a scientific recital of actual events in their historical sequence.  The first eleven chapters of Genesis and much else in the Hebrew Scriptures can only be properly read and understood as ‘myth’ in the sense that I have defined it.  It is an example of ‘sacred history’ whose purpose is to draw mind and heart to recognition of the God of Israel as the one and only Lord of the universe, and to worship him accordingly.  Biblical myth thus unites history and eternity, and its ultimate purpose is to lead us beyond the limits of space and time, to open our eyes and hearts to transcendent reality and ultimate Truth.”  (p 223)

The purpose of the Old Testament is not mostly to give us history or science, rather its very purpose is to help us see God and to recognize God’s own activity in this world.  To look to the Bible for science and history is to lose sight that it is revealing God to us, it is using history to reveal transcendence to us, to open our eyes to the Kingdom of God, not to teach us material science.  This is how understanding myth and poetry can uplift us to see the transcendent God in the words of Scripture.

Science has tried to carve out its role as studying the empirical universe and thus limiting its study to materialism.  The fight between science and religion is between those who won’t accept the limits science imposes on itself and those who want to impose on science a narrative that is beyond what science is claiming for itself.  Some want the Bible to be “science” but it can never be that by the very definition that modern science imposes on itself.   The very nature of the Bible – a revelation from, about and of the transcendent – is outside anything science can deal with.  It is a narrative that guides believers in their understanding of the empirical universe (that which is the limit of scientific study).  Science is trying to reveal all the mysteries which are found in the empirical universe.  If science embraces an overarching narrative, it is a narrative that is limited to the empirical order which science studies.  Its conclusions can’t be beyond what the physical world can reveal.   Science cannot offer that narrative which guides believers in understanding the created order, though scientific discovery can cause believers to have to re-imagine their narrative because of the marvels it discovers.

“This was the approach adopted by the early Church Fathers, and it needs to be our approach today as well.  It means also that the Christian narrative, from the call of Israel to the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection and ascension of the Son of God, needs to be conceived as myth in the true sense: a narrative that opens eyes of faith to the presence of eternity within our time and space, and to the working out within that framework of our salvation.” (p 233)

The Bible does not limit itself to speaking about space and time, but rather its context is God and how space and time occur within the God in whom we live and move and have our being.  Creation speak about the Creator.  Science can and does teach us about creation, but it cannot speak to that truth of the transcendent reality to which creation is a witness.  The Bible speaks to us about the transcendent God who is ever attempting to reveal Himself in ways we can comprehend – which means in and through the created order.  We can marvel when science reveals some hidden truth which helps us know the Creator, but we can also marvel when science simple reveals something about material creation, when science unlocks some mystery about the empirical universe.  Believers may be able to use scientific insight to better understand God’s revelation, but science will never be able to do that.

Next: The Transcendent Myth

 

The Kingdom of God Revealed in the World

“God desires this. His Kingdom is not accessible, except through the chaos of this world. It is not the transplanting of something alien into the being of the world, but the revelation of the hidden depths of the world itself.”

(Paul Evdokimov, In the World, of the Church, p. 210)

Seeing With the Eyes of Faith

The first teaching given to us in writing is, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” and all the other statements about creation. By faith we understand that the ages were brought to completion by the word of God so that what is seen might be made from what is invisible (Hebrews 11:3): the body’s eye did not recognize the God of all as creator; instead, faith instructed us that God, who has always existed, created what did not exist. There is, after all, no example of this among human beings; yet though learning nothing of the kind from nature, we have in faith a teacher of the unexpected. Human beings, of course, make something out of something, whereas the God of all produced what exists out of nothing.

(Theodoret of Cyrrus, Commentary on the Letters of St. Paul, pp. 181-182)

The Bee is the Worship of God

The bee is the worship of God (St Macarius, d. 392AD)

I have posted several accounts about bees through the years, noting how bees are kept in high regard by many spiritual writers in the Orthodox tradition  (see for example:

The Blessing of the Bees

How Sweet It Is to Bee

Flies, Bees and Seeing One’s Own Sin

Three Hierarchs: Apis mellifera 

“Let your works form as it were a honeycomb of sweetness, for virginity deserves to be compared to bees, being so industrious, so modest, so self-controlled.  The bee feeds on dew, it knows no marriage bed, it forms honey.  The dew of the virgin is the divine utterance – because the words of God descend like dew.   ….  Daughter, how I wish you to be an imitator of this little bee whose food is the flower, whose offspring is gathered by mouth and formed by mouth.  Imitate it, daughter.”  (St Ambrose of Milan (d. 397AD), EARLY CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY, pp 93-94)

Bees are used as models of virtue, inspiring us to good behavior.  They are used to teach about the spiritual life, sometimes allegorized to make specific points to help us understand the world as Christians.  They are used to explain the mysteries of God’s own activity in our lives.  Usually it is the honey bee (apis mellifera)  that is being mentioned in these Orthodox writings, but my posts have photos of all kinds of bees, just because I like the bees in general.   The honey bee has been domesticated by humans since the time of the Egyptian Pharaohs.  It is the only insect I know for which there are specific Orthodox prayers asking God to bless them and their hives.

The brother inquired again, “Tell me about constancy in God, my father.” Abba Macarius said to him, “It is like the honeybee flying in the midst of the green plants and the flowers of the field, sucking honey until it fills its hive with what it has gathered: unless someone smokes out the hive, it cannot be robbed of its sweetness.” The brother said to him, “What is the smoke and what is the sweetness, my father?” The old man said to him, “Acts of fornication and defilements and abominations and pollutions and envious thoughts and hatreds and vain imaginings and the remaining pleasures: these are the smoke. The flowers on the other hand are the virtues;

the bee is the worship of God; the hive is the heart; the sweetness itself is our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, the person who shows constancy and who fills his soul with all the virtues and with all purity is the one who demonstrates constancy in God. Go, my child.”   (St. Macarius The Spirit Bearer: Coptic Texts Relating To Saint Macarius, Kindle Location 2409-2418)

A Syrian monk of the 4th Century writes:

“Like a bee that secretly fashions its comb in the hive, so also grace secretly forms in hearts its own love.  It changes to sweetness what is bitter, what is rough into that which is smooth.”  (PSEUDO-MACARIUS: THE FIFTY SPIRITUAL HOMILIES, p 132)

“Look at the bee, how diligently it labors!  It gives of itself without reserve, unsparingly.  The lifespan of a bee is a month and a half at the most.  It often dies working without going back to its home, the hive.  And we?  How we pity ourselves and spare ourselves!  . . .  we give up immediately if things do not go the way we want them to!”  (Elder Thaddeus, OUR THOUGHTS DETERMINE OUR LIVES, p 90)

You can find other of my bee photos at https://www.flickr.com/photos/frted/        Search for bees or bee and click on Search Photos.

Heaven and Earth are Full Of God’s Glory

By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.   (Psalms 33:6)

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.  (Psalms 19:1)

His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise.   (Habakkuk 3:3)

One of the most wonderful things to contemplate from the Scriptures are relationships.  We have of course the mysterious relationship between Creator and creation.  Then within the Godhead there is the relationship of the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Each of the Persons of the Trinity has a relationship with creation.  In Genesis 1:1-3, the Spirit (the Breath of God) hovers over the face of the earth and when God speaks the Word (the Son of God), Light comes into existence, but not the light of the sun which does not yet exist.

“It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the LORD made heaven and earth . . .”   (Exodus 31:17)

Then there is the relationship between heaven and earth and the relationship of both heaven and earth to the Creator.   Heaven is the mysterious abode of God, and yet it is related to the rest of creation, all of it together is “not God” but created by God.  According to Christ, “Heaven and earth will pass away” (Matthew 24:35), they are not eternal and yet God the Eternal One fills them with His glory and becomes united to them.   Heaven and earth are both dwelling places.  Dwellings are temporary places, and yet significant to our eternal God.  We see the mystery in these two statements by father and son.  King David declares part of the wonder and glory of God on earth, while his son Solomon realizes the inadequacy of the earth for fulfilling its role.

King David says: “O LORD, I love the house in which you dwell, and the place where your glory abides.”  (Psalms 26:8)

King Solomon says: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!”  (1 Kings 8:27)

The exact relationship of God the Creator to God’s own creation defies easy explanation and yet we still can experience it, as we sing in the Liturgy:

“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. “

Heaven and earth, though created, are full of God’s glory.  Both heaven and earth are full of God’s glory and both proclaim God’s glory to all beings who are capable of hearing and seeing.

 Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the LORD.  (Jeremiah 23:24)

Not only does God’s glory fill heaven and earth, the Lord God fills heaven and earth.  God’s glory is not something other than God.   Creation, that which is “not God” is filled by God’s glory by God’s existence.  The relationship between God and that which is “not God” is a mystery indeed.  For how can God in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) fill the heaven and earth which are created and circumscribed by God?  We are in God and God is in us! A relationship fully exemplified by Mary the Theotokos.  Mary like Christ, each in their own way, personify the mystery of the interpenetration of Creator and creation.

Then we have St Irenaeus saying: “The glory (shekinah) of God is a human being fully alive.”  So how can heaven and earth be full of a human being?  The mystery deepens for  it is Christ as the incarnate God  who fills the universe with Himself.  So St Paul can write:  “and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith . . . that you may be filled with all the fulness of God.”  Christ fills not only the entire universe but each of us.

all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD   (Numbers 14:21)

Blessed be his glorious name forever; may his glory fill the whole earth.  Amen and Amen.   (Psalms 72:19)

Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.”  (Isaiah 6:2-3)

Our very existence makes us part of the mystery of God’s own relationship with all of creation.  We experience the glory of God, perhaps most intently and clearly in the Liturgy, but that should open our eyes to seeing God’s glory in all of creation including in our fellow human beings.  It is also why the Fall, sin  and the fallen world are so painful to us for they obscure the glory of God reducing everything to mere materiality void of its natural spirituality.

Yours, O LORD, are the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty; for all that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom, O LORD, and you are exalted as head above all.   (1 Chronicles 29:11)