Immanence and Glimmers
Immanence and Glimmers
Sue Fulmore
Under the surface, there exists a Presence that we can only see in glimpses and glimmers. By the time we do a double-take to capture the sight, it is gone—with just a whisper of wonder, a dusting of eternity is left in its place. The trembling dewdrop on the silken web; the way the light catches the leaf, illuminating its veins; the look of love in the eyes of a friend, when shame is trying to break me.
In St. Francis’s Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon, he attests to the Presence in everything. The sun bears witness to the radiance of God. The air speaks of His care over all creatures. Mother Earth reflects His providential care over all. St. Francis saw within the entirety of creation the image of God reflected as in a mirror.
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As the ambulance carried my family and me down the rough mountain road, it felt as though we were being carried close in the embrace of God.
This emergency trip was an interruption into the middle of our family vacation in Costa Rica. For almost two days, I had curved myself inward as a way to manage the pain coursing through my body. I moaned out prayers in this foreign land and sensed a loving presence sustaining me. What I thought might be food poisoning turned out to be a ruptured appendix.
Peace was in the air as the ambulance bumped its way down the mountain, a calmness I could not account for. Breathing through the pain, I caught glimpses of the beauty as we drove, held my daughter’s hand, and heard the doctor in the front scold the driver when we hit a particularly deep pothole.
The presence of a sovereign hand orchestrating events is the only way to explain the timing, the presence of an English-speaking doctor in a remote mountain village, private health insurance, an ambulance driver with the skills of a stuntman to navigate through the streets of San Jose, a student nurse from Michigan who made sure my needs were met, and surgery before the poisons spread throughout my body. It seemed as though the curtain had been pulled back for these few days allowing me to see more than a glimmer of the goodness of God.
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There are glorious days when the reality of a God who inhabits everything is undeniable. Every so often, we may know the truth of these words of old, “I am a feather upon the breath of God” spoken by Hildegard von Bingen. For brief periods we live weightless, carried upon the exhale of God our Maker. Like the leaves in autumn riding the wind, floating and dancing effortlessly. We are held aloft and shepherded in ways we rarely perceive. There is a quiet confidence in the ever-present undergirding of the loving hands of the creator of all.
And there are other times where the walls of doubt close in around me. Frederick Buechner reminds me of the paradoxical immanence of God when he says, “Be silent and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. Be silent and listen to the stones cry out.” When I long for proof—a burning bush, writing on the wall—He leaves bread crumbs, a faint trail to find Him. We learn to hunt for Him amidst our ordinary days. We try to capture Him being entirely present in all things.
I find myself straining and tuning my ears to hear the One who frustratingly speaks in silence and nudgings. I see a glimmer when, beyond my own capabilities, I am able to love; when, in the midst of the storms of life, I feel an incomprehensible peace overwhelming and upholding me, an assurance I am not alone.
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When God first breathed life into the cosmos, the exhalation brought life to the dust of the ground where man was formed. God walked in the garden with the people He created; His glory was revealed in all facets of His handiwork.
However, as the journey of God and His people progressed through Ancient Israel, Moses makes a request to see God but is only allowed a glimpse of His back. Christian Wiman observes, “God’s absence is always a call to His presence. Abundance and destitution are two facets of the one face of God, and to be spiritually alive in the fullest sense is to recall one when standing squarely in the midst of the other.” Bereft of glimmers today, we can recall those of yesterday. The Israelites followed the cloud through the wilderness, a hidden God in plain sight.
And then Jesus comes to us—Immanuel, God who is with us, who proves His nearness, and when His days of wandering this earth were over, He left some of Himself in those who followed. To this day, the people of God walk around as breathing tabernacles, the place where God dwells.
Perhaps if we look long and hard into the eyes of one another, we will see glimpses of the God who dwells there—this might be our primary source of divine sight. Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed that the presence of Jesus is always stronger in another’s heart than our own—so we look to each other for the flicker of faith. Dr. Randy Woodley elaborates, “The breath of God, the spirit, is in everything. So, everything has dignity on earth. When we have that kind of relationship and understand that the tree is my relative, the frog is my relative, the birds are my relative—that we are all related to each other in some way, then what we do to each affects everything else.”
What if we lived with this awareness that everywhere we looked, there was God? The stately spruce trees living the life God breathed into them, the birds exclaiming His glory from the treetops, His very image shining out through our neighbor’s eyes, his orchestration of events, even in the face of fear and tragedy. We could be walking around doused in His presence, dripping with the Divine, and filled with wonder at His nearness.
We would see how true it is that, as Buechner says, “there is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly.”
Each day I am learning to have eyes to see, ears to hear and a heart enlarged to live tuned to the immanence and glimmers of our God.
Sue Fulmore
Writer & Speaker
Sue is a freelance writer and speaker, seeking to use words to awaken mind and soul to the realities of the present. Like a prospector panning for gold, she uses her pen to uncover beauty and truth hidden just below the surface of our lives. She is the mother of two adult daughters and lives in sunny Alberta, Canada with her retired husband, plant babies, and robust shoe collection. You can find her on Instagram and at her Website
Photography by Jonathan Kopf