Amazement should mark our every inhalation – amazement that we live, that love and thought and breath find home in our flesh! Amazement too that there is a distinct “I” who is the self who is invited to amazement – an “I” who is simultaneously on the journey, and who is observer, tactician, poet/philosopher, and chronicler of the way traveled.
The God-Creator of all the universe inhabits our very being. How is it possible that someOne larger than is imaginable is integrally woven into our most intimate being’s fiber? We should just explode, in our vulnerability! And yet, it seems, it is vulnerability and weakness and empty openness that most draws God’s artful presence and play which shapes and shatters and sends us.
Fragile flesh is holy, the Incarnation tells us so. I came across this translation of a piece from St. Irenaus, which prompted my musing. I hope the poetry hints for you at some of the truth which should send all of us into wonder, and tutor our thinking, and foster wisdom.
The tender flesh itself
will be found one day
— quite surprisingly —
to be capable of receiving,
and, yes,
capable of embracing
the searing energies of God.
Go figure. Fear not.
For even at its beginning
the humble clay received
God’s art, whereby
one part became the eye,
another the ear, and yet
another the impetuous hand.
Therefore, the flesh
is not to be excluded
from the wisdom and the power
that now and ever animates
all things. His life-giving
agency is made perfect,
we are told, in weakness —
made perfect in the flesh.
– St. Irenaus (c.125 – c.210),
adapted and translated by Scott Cairn in Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life
In-Spirited Travel Log 