Eternal Grace Happens

delivered at First Congregational Church of Murphys, CA

on October 24, 2010

Psalm 150

Matthew 6:5-8

Meister Eckhart said, “Every creature is a word of God and a book about God.” I think that there isn’t anything in the universe that doesn’t communicate with its source, the Creator of all that IS, whom we call God. For instance, an alpine field of wildflowers is definitely communicating something to God. Perhaps the riot of color is a nonverbal song of praise to God for life and sunshine and earth and bees and rain and love and beauty. I’d like for you to hear something I think is astounding. If you are comfortable, please close your eyes and just allow yourself to relax as we listen to a truly amazing chorus. You are hearing recorded cricket song and the ethereal choir accompanying the crickets is the way you and I would hear it if our metabolisms were sped up to match that of a cricket. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjJNVH01YLo If you wish to hear this again you will find the link to my YouTube channel in the text of this message on my BlogSpot. We often think of cricket chirping as something humble and somewhat “cozy” but this puts the songs of crickets in a completely different category. It makes me wonder what other kinds of communication the non-human inhabitants of this world use when “talking” to God.


Do you recall last week I stated what I believe about all things in the universe being made of the same stuff as God? We call that stuff “soul” and I identified it, quite imaginatively I think, as the substance of the element Love. In fact, perhaps the designation “L∞” should be added to the chart of the elements right along with Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen and Carbon. It used to be understand that God was the elemental force that held everything together. In fact, if we look up the etymology of the word life it goes back to meaning something like, “sticky.”


After Jesus lived and died the earliest believers understood him to be what scholars call the Cosmic Christ. He was the Logos, the original creative word of God made flesh and dwelling among us. He became that divine someone, the very substance of life itself that held the entire cosmos together and revealed the elemental nature of God. This is what caused the writer of the Gospel of John to declare, “In him was life and the life was the light of men.” This is, partially, what caused Paul to declare that we are one body in Christ and to exhort us all to have the mind of Christ, to live in Christ Jesus. We are to inhabit Christ, the soul of the cosmos, just as our bodies inhabit our souls.


If we put these ideas together, that 1) everything in the universe is, at its most basic level, made up of the same substance so that we are all really one in many forms and manifestations; and 2) that the second aspect of God in the trinity, the Christ, is the very soul of the cosmos; then there really is no separation between ourselves, or anything else for that matter, and God except that upon which we insist and persist in calling sin. So, if we are all in constant connection and communion with God and the cosmic Christ (which, by the way, all of the spiritual leaders and mystics in every faith tradition have identified and named as something similar, and which our tradition identifies as having been corporally manifested in Jesus of Nazareth) if we are all in everlasting communion with God then I really believe that everything in the universe is in communication with God at all times and that Paul’s exhortation to pray without ceasing is redundant because we can’t help ourselves. If prayer is communication between ourselves and God then we do it, constantly, just by the very simple fact that we exist. With this perspective suddenly all sorts of ideas make sense from the ancient Greek concept of the “music of the spheres” to the current Theory of Everything which sprang out of a combination of Einstein’s theories and the various String Theories of Quantum physics. Everything that exists at the most elemental levels vibrates at various levels and manifests in what are now believed to be 11 different dimensions, most of which we cannot, in this form, at least, even perceive.


Last week I talked about the fact that we seem to be the only creatures in existence that can pretend to be something we are not. Everything else absolutely has to be authentically itself from the tiniest insects to the largest mammals living on land or in the sea. I think that what we heard a few minutes ago was the sound of crickets praising God just for being. I think they celebrate themselves as part of life. Of course, we have no way of knowing what they think or feel. I am, once again, using my imagination to create the world the way I would like it to be, just as God used God’s imagination to create the world the way God thought was pretty cool, and I find myself in agreement. This space-time continuum we call the world and the universe is, by its very nature, really “good.” What more reason is there to praise God? Life IS good and we are alive and exist exclusively in God’s love but we forget and pretend that this is not the case, at all.


Because we have been defining grace as “that which removes all that separates us from full relationship with God,” then we could say that our very existence – as beings who live and move and have our being completely from within God’s very own being, Love – our very existence IS GRACE! Matthew Fox says that in cosmology we find ourselves in relation with all the other beings of creation whom it is clear are graced. The anthropocentric nature of religion has to keep focusing on sin and redemption but when we focus on ourselves as part of the Grace-fullness of creation we are free to feel graced, ourselves.


Fox declares, “The response to grace is praise…our civilization is in a praise crisis, we are starving for reasons to praise...we’ve lost the sense of grace and of praise.” Rupert Sheldrake adds his explanation to this phenomenon of a praise crisis: “There’s a very strong strain in science, …which removes praise. The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, for example, says that everything you see, however wonderful it may seem, is merely a matter of chance mutation and natural selection, the purposeless product of blind mechanisms,” and Matthew Fox retorts, “It stuffs the praise back into your body, doesn’t it? Even if you’re feeling grace, you don’t dare let anyone know.”


He continues, “When I say we’re in a praise crisis I mean we’re anal-retentive as a civilization. And there’s nothing more anal-retentive than worship. Check it out. Almost everyone in our formal worship in the West is holding back. Our body isn’t there, we’re holding back; the breath isn’t there; the spirit isn’t there. Praise is very practical. Getting praise back is about getting our breath back, it’s about getting our energy back, and it’s about our capacity to let go and to rediscover a capacity for joy and a bigness of soul.”


Praise is the basic form of prayer. The word Grace and the word “thank you” in Latin, Gratia, are the same word. “Gratisas agimus tibi in the Mass – we give you thanks. So gratitude is an intricate part of grace. Meister Eckhart says, ‘If the only prayer you say in your whole life is thank you, that would suffice…. Being grace-conscious is being grateful.”


Martin Buber was a Jewish, German theologian and he had an idea about God so he wrote a book about it called “Ich und du.” In German this means, “I and you.” The title has been translated to “I and Thou” because Buber was talking to the you who is God. But the pronoun, “du” in German is the intimate form of “you.” It is the “you” who is a close personal friend, with whom you can be yourself at all times. It is the “you” who is beloved, a member of your close family. We don’t have such a designation in English but this is what he meant in his title and when you read what he wrote that becomes abundantly clear. Herr Buber’s idea was this: that we cannot experience God, we can only encounter God in the present moment, in person, in the immediate “now.” To explain this much further would take much of the rest of the day but suffice it to say that this is the very meaning of the term “Emmanuel” which means, God is with us. We can only invoke our conscious perception of God’s presence in this very moment and this is extremely important to the concept of prayer which is defined as communing, our unifying ourselves, with God.


In researching the subject of grace I’ve discovered what is for me a newish form of prayer called Visio Divina, which means “divine seeing” or “divine sight” and the gist is that in prayer we use our imaginations to have a personal, one on one, I and you, encounter with God. I say “newish” because I think we, as a species, have actually been participating in this type of prayer all along. How it works is that we quiet our bodies and our thoughts and we focus first on our breath, in order to center ourselves. Then we allow ourselves to perceive that we are, in fact, in the presence of God.


This is quite terrifying for many people because we judge ourselves so harshly. But the premise of Visio Divina is that God’s grace is sufficient for whatever we bring before God in the form of the faults, shortcomings and burdens – the bricks and stones, if you will, with which we build up the walls, the sins, that effectively separate us from being fully present with God. God’s love does not even acknowledge the existence of these walls, these sins, the obstacles of our own making for Jesus has already spanned the heights and the depths of the sins we place between ourselves and our beloved God. That’s what he came here to do, to experience all our sins and then to smash them to smithereens. As Paul writes, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.


So, Visio Divina starts from this place of acknowledging our sins, those life experiences and memories of events that have caused a blockage, a wall, a veil, an obstruction of some kind between God and us. In our heightened sense of awareness of ourselves in our present state of being, of our pain or our resentment, of our fear and anxiety, of our sorrow or loneliness or lack of self-worth, our self-condemnation, we open ourselves to God’s healing presence and allow God to offer to us, in person, whatever it is that we need in order to be healed of that which blocks us from living each moment in God’s love.


Visio Divina allows us to avail ourselves of the idea that God’s grace is eternal. It invites us to engage our imaginations in such a way that we can meet God in person, in a manner which is most familiar and meaningful to our present state of being human, so that God can touch us, embracing us in tender compassion. In Visio Divina God can hold us while we cry out our grief and heartache. God can walk with us, arm in arm, as we traverse a difficult road in our lives. Many people encounter Jesus as a mother figure in Visio Divina who nurtures them as infants, when they first began to feel unloved and unlovable due to the unhealed hurts that had been inflicted upon their parents in their childhoods. This is only one of the many kinds of prayer we can practice but I think it is one of the most important kinds of prayer practices especially for those of us who haven’t had or don’t get a lot of practice because it is a prayer which facilitates God’s grace, the removal of sin, obstacles, that keep us from moving any more deeply into relationship with God in the first place.


Notice that I used the word “practice” in reference to prayer because the act of intentionally perceiving ourselves to be in the presence of God is something that we have fallen out of the habit of doing. We have learned to perceive ourselves and our entire reality as being separate and “out of touch” with God. We have also become quite habituated to living in – that is keeping our awareness in – either the past or the future. Being in the moment, applying the “power of now” as Eckhart Tolle says, takes practice. It doesn’t come naturally. I’ll illustrate: picture past, present and future as being in the shape of a shallow bell curve with the present at the apex and the past and future at either end. How easy is it to stay in that place of the immediate present? It isn’t! It takes a conscious effort or we gently slide toward one end of the curve or another; into the memory of the past or into a projection of the future. Being more consciously aware of our eternal state of grace – our constant connection with God which is continuously reoccurring in each next present moment – takes practice on our parts. Which is why we call prayer – the state of being in intimate communion with God – a spiritual practice.


As we become more practiced at the skill of staying present with God, at staying in an eternal state of grace, our joy multiplies exponentially and our souls grow. This results in praise, in the spontaneous expression of our joy in our living in eternal grace. May the grace of God continuously be increasing our joy and may we one day achieve the praise mastery of even the crickets. Amen.





Buber, Martin, I and Thou. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970

Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake, Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science. New York: Doubleday, 1996

Kuchan, Karen, Visio Divina: A New Prayer Practice for Encounters With God. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2005