The givenness !

The golden hour of light conditions bring the best of hues of colour!

The spectrum of colours from yellow to pink in different merging shades is the high light of the flower cluster above. 

This imagery helped me to get a glimpse of human life from birth. It was when I saw the picture of an infant on the first day of his birth, I got a sense of who that infant would become during infancy and thereafter! 

The flowers have a given colourfulness and radiance!

So it is with us. We bear and witness to the transcendent God, whose being within us makes our share the fullness we are blessed with. 

Arising out of ideas developed by Plato and Aristotle, the insight about the Great Chain of being was pursued by philosophers. Ken Wilber who explored this further might have drawn his roots of thinking from  Augustinian and Thomistic theology to stratify our levels of existence at five different levels: matter, life, mind, soul and spirit. Ken Wilber suggested that 'Physics studies matter, biology looks at life, psychology at the mind, theology at the soul and mysticism at the spirit'.

According Plotinus, a third century Egyptian philosopher, who ' taught that this supreme, totally transcendent One, contains no division, multiplicity or distinction and beyond all categories and objects. The One is not simply a sum for all things but is prior to everything and source of everything that exists. The One contains everything that exists, just as white contains the entire spectrum of light that we witness in the rainbow. All things that exist emanate from the One.  The emanation ex den (out of God) confirms the absolute transcendence of the One  and makes the unfolding of the cosmos a consequence of the existence of the One' (page 24 Spirituality and wakening self  by David G. Benner). 

It was an unusual radiance of flowers with an exuberant blending of colours which awoke in me a sense of the givenness of God the creator! Jesus of Nazareth further affirmed the nature of the incarnational God, although transcendent!

David Benner adds another thought to this transcendent God: ' Just as the sun emanates light without appearing to diminish itself or mirror produces reflections of objects tat in no way diminish or alter the mirror, so too the emanations from the One in no way diminish or alter the One' (p 24).  I like the way David Benner makes a statement of clarity to bring immense encouragement. ' Nothing exists that has not come from God and nothing exists that is not in God and God in it. Though God is beyond the material world and not reducible to it, the divine life interpenetrates every atom of the created order' (p25). 

The colourful radiance is a reflection of God's givenness. An infant born to a family brings the image and presence of God into their home!

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)