A Spark of Divinity

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters, cp

Sunday, 7th May 2017

Many years ago, I was walking outside Mount Argus here with one of our students. I was wearing our Passionist habit; he was dressed in ‘normal’ clothes. We met some children coming home from school and chatted happily with them (which we wouldn’t do nowadays!), exchanging jokes and stories. Because of this happy chat, one of the little girls looked up at me and said, “You’re nice!” The student immediately asked her, “Why did you say that?” And she, without a pause, replied, “Because he’s a priest!” Then I asked her, “What about him, is he not nice, too?” And she said, “Yeh, he’s nice too,” “And why?” says I. And, quick as a flash, she replied, “Because he’s a man!” Out of the mouth of babes – the ancient dualism that has plagued Christianity down the centuries: priest and man, holy and human, sacred and secular.

Most of us have grown up with these unhelpful dualisms: soul and body, spiritual and material, church and world, with the understanding that soul is good, body is bad, spiritual is good, material is bad, church is good, world is bad! We need to rid ourselves of this false and misleading scheme of things that we have inherited. We need to fan into flame the spark of the divine in everything that God has created – and that means everything! In the story of creation, over and over again, it is repeated that “God saw that it was good.” And that includes us! In “Marriage Encounter” they used have that memorable phrase: “God doesn’t make junk!” He created us and he created us good and true and beautiful. But good people need a lot of convincing before they will believe this. And why? Because they have grown up with more emphasis on original sin than original blessing; more focus on sin and guilt than on their own goodness and beauty. If only we could take to heart the teaching of St.Thomas Acquinas when he says: “God is an artist and the universe is God’s work of art.” This means that every creature “can rightly be called God’s work of art.” He continues, “All artists love what they give birth to – parents love their children; poets love their poems; craftspeople love their handiwork. How then could God hate a single thing since God is the artist of everything?”

And God created us more than just good. He created us with a spark of divinity. With the incarnation, when God takes on our human flesh and blood in Jesus, this becomes more obvious. But it is simply making clear what was there from the beginning.

 And every day in the Mass when the drop of water is drowned in the wine, we say: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.