Making Space for the God of the Cosmos

Making Space for the God of the Cosmos
For the patronal festival at St. Michael and All Angels, Bridgewater SA
What does it take to see the stars?
Our gaze is settled on the ground.
Those minute pinpoints in the night
are blazing suns immensely far
beyond us, yet our city lights
have dimmed them, and we’re less aware.

When we were young, we’d go outside
to gaze beyond ourselves in awe,
and search to find the Southern Cross
as though to anchor us in space
amidst that wheeling panoply
of alien suns and worlds and lives.

Now though the internet provides
an image of a nebula
like angels spreading out their wings,
somehow we can’t accept there might
be angels like a radiant cloud
of awesome energy and light.

In earlier times, the heavens were ours,
a roof for Earth, and further on
and up, we’d place the realm of God
to which we might aspire through Christ,
when earthly life was laid aside
and angels brought us gently home.

But in this cosmos we are small,
and up and down are all around,
and God’s creating so immense
in light and energy and fire
that somehow interact to spark
the miracles of diverse life.

Where then are we, but specks of dust
upon a small and fragile rock
that whirls around a minor sun?
Is heaven all around us now,
and God both present and beyond,
more awesome than we ever dreamed?

On every world where beings live
the God of being surely is,
and comes as Christ to share that life,
that death, and hope of life beyond.
Do they like us refuse to look
beyond the limits of their space?

Are we the blindest of the blind,
who gaze on screens and call that life,
domesticating mystery
until we think we’re only dust?
Do angels try to draw our eyes
out to the many worlds beyond

where light flows on at constant speed,
and gravity will always draw
all bodies to relationship,
and mass to energy transforms?
Are these all forms of truth and love
and Spirit, energy from God?

The resurrected Christ it seems
still bore the stamp of earthly life
beyond the limits of space/time.
His flesh and spirit shifted place
with both still present but transformed,
ascending into cosmic Christ.

When Michael threw the fallen ones
upon the earth, our souls were drawn
to idolize the physical.
So angel messengers descend
and lift our spirits. Then God’s Word
will find a space in us for birth.
            Barbara Messner September 2016