Revelación

“Jesus said, ‘Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you’ ” (Matthew 16:17).

A pause this morning between preparations for classes. Jesus says Peter’s confession of the Messiah, the Son of God, comes from God and not from the people around him. And Peter is blessed because his knowledge of Christ was revealed by God and not by others. And I am trying to harmonize this understanding of revelation through God alone with the understanding that God became human, the Word became flesh, and now in Christ risen and glorified, everything that lives and that breathes, human beings and all creatures, can reveal the living God. I wonder about it this morning as I give thanks for the beauty of God through the beauty of Bolivia, natural and cultural; the goodness of God through the goodness of the brothers, the language school community, and the people; the truth of God through the grammar and poetry of Spanish; and the love of God through the love from so many dear ones, a love that takes me by surprise and lately leaves me stunned.

The best I can come up with is that grace is leading me surely more and more into the company of the lovers and knowers of God. It’s not that I have left “the world,” the flesh and blood of merely human communities that cannot signify of themselves that which is holy. Rather it is that I am being led gently beyond that unperceiving, unrevealing world to the people and places where one can sense with the spiritual sense the holy signs of God’s love that are always around us. Who knows what myriad of signs and wonders are occurring at any hour when the bread and wine are consecrated at the altar? Who knows but that the flora in this cloister garden genuflect at the altar of the earth, while we genuflect at the altar of God?

Peter could not apprehend the secret of life on his own. Jesus chose him, loved him, and led him to light and truth, beauty and grace. So God alone did reveal something new to Peter, but because all of Peter was taken up by Christ, it was not without Peter’s humanity that God in Jesus revealed something new. Thus not by Peter’s human nature, but not without his human nature. In the company of Christ, Peter can see and hear and speak truly of all that is holy.

The friars of this convent begin and conclude each hour of the divine office with this prayer of St. Francis taken from his Testament: “We adore you, most holy Lord Jesus Christ, here and in all churches of the world; and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.” As they recite this prayer they genuflect before the tabernacle. It is a gesture I make willingly, a ritual I hope forms my posture to the world. For, like Peter, I feel I have been picked up and led into a place where I can see, hear, and speak of new things in heaven and earth with grace, beauty, and love.