I was sitting in a window seat from Pittsburgh to Atlanta for a noon flight. It was early November. The sun was directly overhead and the sky blue and cloudless. As I leaned my forehead against the plastic of the window, I looked down on patchworks of farmland and the mountains of the Appalachians, but because of the position of the sun, every body of water reflected and sparked with the light, turning silver underneath the plane. The light ran down rivers making them look like branching arteries. Simple farm ponds blazed silver and the borders of lakes were revealed. The great Ohio river traveled forward like lava. 

 

But it was the dark forests of the mountains which surprised me most. As we traveled over rounded peaks, the sun sparked the rivers deep inside the woods. Reflected light cascaded down the mountains. The hidden was revealed.  

 

And I wondered, how does God see the hidden beauty of the human soul? 

 

 

God’s Grandeur

A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

And if nature is charged with the grandeur of God, how much more the human soul which has been crafted in God’s image? 

 

 

 

As I looked down on the mountains and rivers, I kept thinking of how God was able to see from this perspective whenever He wished. His eyes could pierce thick clouds, or the haze of smog or tight clumps of trees.

 

Sometimes we get a glimpse of a soul and we want to take off our shoes. Whether it’s looking into the eyes of the checkout clerk surprised someone truly wants to know how she’s doing or a spiritual directee who lets me see the pain underneath her socially accepted story. Like all of us, she’s become adept at holding up a whole bevy of masks. Every time she walks into our chapel for direction, she takes a while to settle, going through an awkward song and dance performing for my approval before becoming quiet and receptive to the Spirit.

 

What she doesn’t know is that underneath, when the Holy Spirit broods over her vulnerable story, she’s stunning. 

And then as she closes her eyes childlike, holding her face up to the light of God’s Presence I too am warmed by her light. 

 

 

We all walk in as strangers. 8 people around a table, a tall glass candle in the center reminding us of God’s presence as we bring out into the light each tender place in our journey. It’s a healing care group, a curriculum from Terry Wardle and Healing Care ministries. I tell most people from church that it’s Discipleship 901. It’s a journey into the human soul, what makes us tick, the lies which are smudges on the glass of of our soul and the wounds which caused them. Together we build a group with slow trust and the light of Christ begins transforming the dark corners of our lives.

 

As Sandra Wilson says, “Mature love sees the faults in ourselves and others and learns to love flawed people.”

 

And it’s here in this room I’ve learned to treat the human soul with a lens of grace. Outer behavior usually points to an inner wound.  Every story is hard and holy. Every story is worth taking off our shoes.

 

 

I was people watching up in a cafe on the 7th floor of a Chicago skyscraper, hundreds of people streaming down Michigan Avenue during lunch hour.

 

I had spent the morning taking in the art at the Art institute of Chicago. Seurat’s Sunday in the park, you zoom in close to see tiny points of color. Mary Cassatt’s mother dressed in a blue and grey stripes washing the feet of a small child. And Chagall. I can’t get enough of Chagall.

 

It’s his America’s Windows  (see them here) which I had come to visit. They’re lovely in a photo but with the light behind them, they’re mesmerizing. Six stained glass panels depict Chicago neighborhoods, a red bird, more flame than creature, and in the far right window, a person aflame with fire. Long legs and a round torso of leaves and fire…a burning bush of a person. 

 

We walk beside humans unaware. They serve us our coffee at restaurants. We shift our eyes to the right when we pass the homeless. Yet, they are all immortals, stamped with the image of God. They are art created from skin, muscles, ligaments, blood and God’s breath, black and Asian, Caucasion and Latin American, Middle Eastern.

 

A kaleidoscope.

 

The problem? We stay hidden behind our own narcissistic stories. We’re blind in our own insecurities. We’re fearful of true connection and what it may ask of us. 

 

Exodus 3 asks us, “Will we walk over and see this strange sight?” 

 

Perhaps my worship of God becomes a hunt for what God meant when he created each individual human soul, whether hunched on the sidewalk or trumpeting on a corner.

 

Could we slow down enough to hear the glory God wants to speak through each person?

 

I looked down from the 7th floor onto Michigan avenue. All these beautiful humans. Hundreds of battles. Hundreds of fascinating stories walking through the world semi-awake. Twisted desires. Shoulders bent to worship 1000 different gods. And yet people walking around carrying the mark of God’s image interwoven into their being.

 

 

CS Lewis used these words to describe just this realization:

This is how C.S. Lewis spoke about this theme in his article, The Weight of Glory:

 

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

 

 

 

C.S. Lewis later told a story in The Great Divorce: a book whose premise is a bus trip from hell to heaven. The main character gets a glimpse of heaven while he stands with a Teacher and watches a parade come their direction. This is the story of a soul whose loveliness would not have been noticed on earth. 

 

“First came bright Spirits, not the Spirits of men, who danced and scattered flowers. Then, on the left and right, at each side of the forest avenue, came youthful shapes, boys upon one hand, and girls upon the other. If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. Between them went musicians: and after these a lady in whose honour all this was being done.

 

I cannot now remember whether she was naked or clothed. If she were naked, then it must have been the almost visible penumbra of her courtesy and joy which produces in my memory the illusion of a great and shining train that followed her across the happy grass. If she were clothed, then the illusion of nakedness is doubtless due to the clarity with which her inmost spirit shone through the clothes. For clothes in that country are not a disguise: the spiritual body lives along each thread and turns them into living organs. A robe or a crown is there as much one of the wearer’s features as a lip or an eye.

 

But I have forgotten. And only partly do I remember the unbearable beauty of her face.

 

 

“Is it?…is it?” I whispered to my guide.

“Not at all,” said he. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.”

“She seems to be…well, a person of particular importance?”

“Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.”

“And who are these gigantic people…look! They’re like emeralds…who are dancing and throwing flowers before here?”

“Haven’t ye read your Milton? A thousand liveried angels lackey her.”

“And who are all these young men and women on each side?”

“They are her sons and daughters.”

“She must have had a very large family, Sir.”

“Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.”

“Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?”

“No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”

 

 

“And how…but hullo! What are all these animals? A cat-two cats-dozens of cats. And all those dogs…why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.”

“They are her beasts.”

“Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.”

“Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love.

 

In her they became themselves.

And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.”

 

**Join the presence project by subscribing on the right.**

 

Photo creds:

My head shot, the amazing Miss Jessie Parks

Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash

Photo by Imani Clovis on Unsplash

Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash

Photo by Banter Snaps on Unsplash

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

Photo by Jacek Dylag on Unsplash

Photo by Caroline Hernandez on Unsplash

Photo by Adrien King on Unsplash

Photo by Gabby Orcutt on Unsplash