God Moves

by Margaret McCray, LMFT

612.332.7743 ext. 222
mmccray@wpc-mpls.org

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother's milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into a flowerbed.
As a rose, up from the ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open...

                                                                                     -Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

I remember learning that the quantity of water on earth is a constant.  What is here now has always been here with none of it ever lost or gained.  The appearance of that constant measure of water changes again and again, from solid to liquid to air, from ice to water to steam to mist to clouds and back again.   God is like this and more.  God is found in many forms and places and experiences. An earthquake in Haiti becomes the mobilization of global concern, becomes the adoption of children, becomes the effort towards a more just and healthy Haiti, becomes the hope of what can rise from devastation.  All this from a shift in the depths of a planet simply being a planet.  There is no malice intended, not by Earth, not by God. We respond, and in that we are changed and God's creation is served.