A feel for God

In a draft left abandoned last December, I mused about a Augustinian friend's homily on reading the lives of the saints, particularly their everyday lives. It gives you a feel for how God works in the world, he said. I thought about this off and on throughout the day. It's another riff on Ignatius' sense of "God in all things."

How do we sharpen our senses, get a feel for God? The Exercises are one way, but how do we keep stretching what we've developed. In that season of births and epiphanies, it made sense that I was thinking about how we practice spotting God-with-us. Now I'm thinking about it again in these extraordinary moments of Ordinary Time, where my world has shrunk to a circle with a diameter of how far I can walk in 30 minutes.

This morning, as I walked the same loop I've walked for the last 3 months, I caught a flash out of the corner of my eye, as if there were jewels scattered on the ground. I stopped, looked closed, to see only the patch of weeds growing at the side of the road. Two more steps back and suddenly, for just a second, there they were again. The sun, at just the right angle, turned the last drops of this morning's rain into a panoply of diamonds scattered over the crabgrass. 

I lay your pavements in carnelians, your foundations in sapphires — Isaiah 54:11