The treasure

There’s a fanciful picture in my mind sometimes, of the place where God lives. The sanctuary where God rests, and creates, and feels at home. It comes from this old text (mostly from Psalms 104), imagery imagined and written long, long ago by some ancient Hebrew scribe, or maybe David. It’s a picture that feels to me like something you’d see in Lord of the Rings, something out of a fantasy novel, something that is made of all the natural forms of the universe but without any artificial design, only God’s created things in their most self like being.

I stand on the threshold of this sanctuary, lungs suspended at the intense wonder that fills me, unsure if I should walk in, and my eyes gobble up the space, fascinated by it. The floor is a deep sapphire, almost black and purple in places – a space of moving depthless colour filled with stars and galaxies. Rivers are in there, rivers of time and space and eternity… and the earth too. Walking across it is like walking across moving water – fascinating and hard to look away from.

It’s one of my favourite and most exasperating things about him – the way he blends eternity and spirit into material and physical.

Why does he love doing it?

What is it about physical materials that he so values, so cherishes with their finite, limited qualities? What is it about the blending of the two that he is so fascinated with that he will do it again and again? My heart yearns to know the answer and loves to ponder the mystery even if I never quite figure it out.

His home is a spacious room (the ancient scribes envisioned it as a tent) and yet it’s not really a room at all, with the lush viriditas that Hildegard of Bingen loved to talk about filling every corner. “The greening of all things,” or the essence of him, the creative force in his love, crawls up walls made of mountainsides and rolling hills. Every hue, type, and aroma of growing is here and surrounds him. The air is full of that odd contradiction he makes happen and gets a kick out of, blending movement and stillness together into a symphony of utter peace. It’s a place where you want to simultaneously close your eyes and yet never blink in case you miss a second of its beauty and its rest. Out of one mountainside a cascade of water – fresh and wild and bitingly cold, is gushing down in a white stream that flows through the sapphire ground in a thunderous roar to fill the earth wherever he chooses it to go. His trees beneath are well watered and grow to unbelievable heights. I recently watched a video where a scientist talked about how the laws of physics don’t allow trees to suck water all the way to their tips. And yet those trees do somehow, anyway. And isn’t that what else God loves – the hunt, the layers of meaning and knowledge we get to travel through, peel back and dig under in our search to find him, to understand him. God’s a mystery that never ends, and his home reflects that about him. He makes it in places you’d never expect it to be.

There’s a garment laying across his bed and it gleams and gleams, made of pure light, ready for him to slip on and wear while he peers into the hearts of things and uncovers gems throughout his blend of spirit and earth. So many gems he finds of all different types and sizes and colours. Many are hidden and trapped in dark spaces, waiting for him to pick up and rescue and polish in his hands. He loves working with his hands to free them, patiently stripping away the black layers of coal – the lies and wounds – that tend to smother them. The gems don’t realize what he’s doing until he uncovers them, they miss out on feeling his hands carefully and patiently breaking them free. But He knows that when he cleans them off in his clear, living water, they’ll glimmer and gleam and sing to him with their colourful sparkles. Nestled inside each one is a piece of himself, and it longs to reflect itself back at him, longs to reconnect with its home, is happiest when its free to bounce its own light off his and back again in a never ending loop of recognition and knowing. That is love after all – an eternal movement of finding worth in each other.

I’ve often tried to find my way into this room, and sometimes I forget how easy it is, or even where it’s hidden. There’s a space inside it that I can’t quite see, but still sense is here, both in time and outside it’s bounds, a dark unseen womb that Kierkegaard describes as hidden and fiercely protected against discovery. It’s in there where the fullness – the abundance – of this being in three, fashioned my soul; used mystery and love and purpose to wrap pieces of who God is into bits of time and material.

Then, after I was fashioned and completed inside his hidden workspace, I was born into a life that is both good and hard, beautiful and awful and free in its unraveling. He placed me here on this material plane of time so I could live and blend that spirit with physical finite things. Time pushed me along, like the other gems, the other souls out there, each in their own field, all of us set free to become. It’s where we collect adventures and experiences… and bits of poisonous mud at the same time. At times, we’re clear eyed – enchanted with the world and God however we see him or her, and we experience the wonder. But other times we’re trapped beneath layers of coal, smothered in lies we’ve accepted and let veil our eyes – lies, hurts, shame that keep us from seeing ourselves or the infinite Being that thought us up first.

Thank goodness he likes to search through his Earth and his universe for his things. That he loves to create and explore and discover. He’s always looking to find his treasures. And in his travels through this strange and marvellous existence called life, he keeps finding me when I think I’m separated from him by my field – the one I thought someone else owned. He keeps scooping me up and hiding me inside the soft soil of his heart – that place he keeps me safe in until he can clean me off and renew me – remind me who I am and who he is to me.

The minute I let him find me again, he walks with long, determined strides back towards his home – strides that tell me he doesn’t mind buying the whole field to get me. He doesn’t mind the time, the patience and effort, the giving of himself – even if it means he has to cross the infinite distance of my idea of separation. Even if it means he takes the darkness and death of that separation into himself, where he weathers the pain of it, lets it bash itself to bits against his fullness, his abundance. And then he banishes it, once again, until I’m free of its despair, and I find myself back home, nestled inside his secret abode where I belong, shining like the colourful little gem I am, reflecting and bouncing light back at the bigness of him and not minding being small at all.

PS. The idea of the infinite distance of separation is taken from Simone Weil’s essay The Love of God and Affliction – a must read.

PPS. The treasure in the field comes from Matthew 13:44 – two ways to look at this parable – mull them over if you so desire