All Creation Is Birthed In The Womb Of God
One Human Cell.
Everything in creation is an utterance of God, breathed and born in the womb of God. Julian of Norwich, the beloved 14th-century Christian mystic whose Revelations of Divine Love is generally considered one of the most remarkable documents of medieval religious experience, loved to refer to Jesus as both Father and Mother from this understanding. “Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.”
What did Julian mean? Perhaps it means that we are endlessly loved and sustained within the Divine womb yet reborn over and over to a higher understanding of Whose and who we indeed are. If we choose to continually die to the false self we have created to survive in the world, we will be reborn into the womb of glorious oneness with the Beloved and His beloveds. Jesus confounded Nicodemus when He said, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”1 Later, He reminded His disciples that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains a seed, but if it dies, it is reborn and bears much fruit.2Knowing He was going to His death, Jesus prayed for His friends, “that they may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” 3 Prayerfully, may we grasp the simple but radical truth that God’s love-longings birthed us and every living thing in and of His very womb. Therefore, to lovingly behold another person or a flower among the weeds or a tree standing exiled on the side of the road or a sudden breeze in love and gratitude is prayer because it honors our Father and Mother God from Whose womb it comes.
The great Russian writer, Fyodor Doestoevsky, calls us from eternity to “Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.” 4
Our friend Betty reminds us in The Hidden Life Awakened that “we desperately need to recover this sense of the Beyond in our midst in order to revive the springs of mystery, beauty, and wonder. Creation is the Spirit’s scaffolding. We cannot touch the Spirit, but we can see and touch creation and allow it to speak to us about the Spirit. Until we can hear the rose speak its message of love to us, we cannot pass beyond its form and allow the Eternal Artist to speak to us through it. All of creation runs on Divine energy that, at its core, is unconditionally loving. The very heartbeat of God is resonating in creation, ever ready for us to discover the hidden mystery of the Creator’s love to which it points. Our work is to begin to reconcile the seen and the unseen and intertwine them within our hearts, renew the depth of our relationship between our spirituality and the mystery of creation, and develop a keen sense of it warming, embracing, and speaking to us. To immerse oneself in the mystery and wonder of creation is to come to know the God beyond and the God within.”5
Ours is a world in which matter is the bearer of Spirit. God clothes Himself in the beauty birthed from His womb. The most profound mystery about us is that the physical covering we carry is, in reality, the temple of the Holy Spirit and a bearer of Christ to the world. We and all created things are inestimably more than random atoms and molecules exploded into being ex nihilo. Every one of the trillions of cells in our body and every cell in creation is a visible sacrament and vehicle of amazing grace. The Incarnation was the ultimate example of this. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus.
