Steven R. Guthrie

“The first task of discernment, then, is not a closing off but an opening up, what we might call responsive discernment. If God’s Spirit is present and working in the world, we should live expectantly, looking attentively for the Spirit’s activity, listening carefully for the Spirit’s voice. Jürgen Moltmann observes that because God’s Spirit fills creation “it is . . . possible to experience God in, with and beneath each everyday experience of the world.”[389] If this is the true shape of the world, then discernment is not a matter of divining those rare instances when God shows up. Instead, it means learning to recognize, as Moltmann writes, “that in everything God is waiting for us.”[390] “Spirituality” on this account will not mean turning away from the world (as if this world were “God-forsaken”) but turning toward it, with Spirit-renewed vision.[391] Where a narrow scientism sees only “an insignificant planet lost in the great cosmic immensity,”[392] the presence and activity of God’s Spirit authorizes us to see the same body as “my Father’s world”— And to my listening ears All nature sings and round me rings The music of the spheres. . . . This is my Father’s world. He shines in all that’s fair. In the rustling grass, I hear him pass He speaks to me everywhere.[393]”
― Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit: The Holy Spirit and the Art of Becoming Human