Omnipresent (Mid-week Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

Omnipresent

August 3, 2016

Last week, on vacation in New Mexico, Elena and went to visit Carlsbad Caverns National Park.  The entrance to the Caverns is on a high escarpment overlooking a broad plain, maybe 500 to 800 feet below.  The Caverns started their formation 250 million years ago in a large reef and later limestone seabed on the edge of a great inland sea of the single continent Pangaea.  Tectonic uplift raised the formation high above sea level; erosion sculpted the rough Guadalupe Mountains out of it.   Deep beneath the surface, water eroded out open spaces and then later deposited minerals to form the glorious decorations throughout the hundred-mile system of caves.  When you arrive, you take an elevator 40 stories down into the rock and arrive at the main cavern rooms.  The air is a cool 55 degrees year round.    The immensity of the cavern rooms, with tall columns and draperies of rock and seemingly bottomless “wells” appearing now and gain, together with the overall darkness combine to create a sense of profound mystery.  After a circuit of inspecting the formations, you go up the elevator again, to look out from the mountaintop over the cliff onto the glorious prospect of the plain hundreds of feet below.  It brought to my mind the words of the Venite, sung each day in Morning Prayer, “In his hands are the caverns of the earth, and the heights of the hills are his also” (BCP, 82; Psalm 95:4).   

The contrast of deep hidden mystery in the bowels of the earth and bright broad panorama from the peak in turn reminded me of the truth that God is beneath, behind, and through all things: not just present through the physically and geographically diverse world, but the diverse emotional and spiritual one as well.  No matter how things are going, God is there.   Psalm 139 expresses this well:

 “Where can I go from your spirit?  
 Or where can I flee from your presence? 

If I ascend to heaven, you are there; 
   if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 

If I take the wings of the morning 
   and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 

even there your hand shall lead me, 
  and your right hand shall hold me fast.” 

Grace and Peace.  

 Fr. Tony+