One on One Hide-and-Seek

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope at your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Now grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the Messiah’s gift. ... The One who descended is the same as the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things. -- Ephesians 4:4-7,10

God is “above all and through all and in all”. The critic, the skeptic and the unbeliever want a simple God who can be easily explained, easily understood, tested and critiqued. They want a God who will fit in their box. They might accept a perfectly transcendent God or a perfectly immanent God. A Deity that is both just gives them a headache. That the Being who creates the universe would care about specks of protoplasm on an insignificant planet is the purest fantasy to them. To go further and think that He would be somehow able to “dwell within” some grubby old person who hasn’t even been to Harvard is absolute madness.

Monotheism does not imply that God is monolithic. God is Being, multifaceted and multidimensional. He meets us where we are willing to meet Him. It does not matter where we seek if we are seeking Him, we will find Him – more accurately, He will find us. He is seeker-sensitive as a coon hound’s nose is coon-sensitive.

One movie I can watch over and over is The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis. Hawkeye promises Cora that he will find her then pursues her and her captors through the wilderness. He walks fearlessly into the midst of the enemy’s camp and takes her out, though not without a sacrifice. That’s the Bridegroom coming after His Bride.

A bold God with eyes like fire is literally a Holy Terror. Yet there He is with feet like burning brass coming down the mountain in hot pursuit of His beloved.

As my Catholic friends tell me, marriage, like everything else is a vocation, a calling. This is true at least in part due to the fact that it dramatizes in the cosmos the spiritual reality in heaven. Having children is a calling and a vocation. Art, literature, science, trades, education, yes, even government is a vocation. In every aspect, every facet of life the grace of God may be given. We can receive the gifts of the Messiah for our particular calling – no matter how mundane it may seem. And we need those gifts and that grace not so much for what we are doing but for what we are being. Part of the grace is to reveal God -- not just to others as a witness, but to ourselves as the players.

“All the world is a stage” – Shakespeare and Saints agree, “The play’s the thing.” Bad actors memorize lines. Good actors create a character. Great actors become the character. “Hypocrite” is the transliteration of a Greek word meaning “George Clooney”.

For my vocation, whatever it is, I need to be filled with the character of Christ. When that happens, my actions are no longer in imitation of Christ – though that is a good start, instead what I do will flow from who I am.

It is a feedback loop that usually gets overstated on one side or the other. When I act like Christ, I begin to understand Christ better. The more of Christ that is revealed to me, the more I act in accordance with what I know about Him – know as in gnosis. These better actions lead, in turn, to greater revelation on an upward spiral to home, until God is all in all.