Divine Spread Everywhere

 

I just read this wonderful passage this morning in Tielhard de Chardin's "The Divine Milieu."
"On some given day a man suddenly becomes conscious that he is alive to a particulr perception of the Divine spread everywhere about him....It began with a particular and unique resonance which swelled each harmony, with a diffused radiance which haloed each beauty...All the elements of psychological life were in turn affected: sensations, feelings, thoughts. Day by day they became more fragrant, more colored, more intense by means of an indefinable thing--the same thing. Then the vague note, and fragrance, and light began to define themselves. And then contrary to all expectation and all probability, I began to feel what was inexpressably common to all things. The unity communicated itself to me by giving me the gift of grasping it. I had in fact acquired a new sense, the sense of a new quality or of a new dimension. Deeper still: a transformation had taken place for me in the very perception of being. From then all being had become, in some way, tangible and savorous to me; and as it came to dominate all the forms which it assumed, being itself began to draw me and to intoxicate me."
When I read this book in my early twenties I doubt that it meant that much to me, but maybe it was one of the many seeds which has now got me thinking of God coming to us through dimensions that we cannot imagine. I'm sure that books like the recent "Skippy Dies" and movies like "The Matrix" added to my thinking this way. And now what little I know about string theory and alternate worlds. I think of a friend trying to tell me 15 years ago about quantum physics. God has used things that I barely grasped to bring me to a new metaphor for relating to the Divine.