Looking within
Every now and then, I start to feel ‘outside of myself’. It’s a strange feeling. Almost as if my body was walking among the world, but I am somewhere else.
The ‘somewhere else’ isn’t somewhere mystical, it is very much in this world – so I feel as if I have fragmented myself. It’s like part of me is in a committee meeting, while another part is listening to someone on the phone, and yet another section of me is thinking through a knotty problem. You might have experienced the same thing from time to time.
Just the other day I had a few minutes when I had arrived early for an appointment. I sat in the car, feeling quite strongly that this was a moment to pull all those fragments together and gather myself together.
Not unlike, I suppose, what happens in the creation of a mosaic from broken pieces of crockery or in the making of the kind of disco ball pictured above this post.
And that’s strange because the disco ball has for some time been a metaphor for me of God. It suggests there are multiple facets to God. And, for our image of God to be adequate, our God-disco-ball needs to be infinitely large and infinitely wide with an infinite number of facets, all present and all reflecting light.
That image of God for me till now has been external – the divine disco ball hanging down from the ceiling, lighting up the world.
Now I’m thinking, maybe God is like me. Maybe that feeling I have of being many facets is an accurate picture of the God-space within me. As I allow quiet space when all the facets can re-align and re-gather and so catch the light, then the God-within-me is brought together, centred and functioning – yes, like a disco ball.
Elsewhere, I recently suggested noticing when Christianity dishes up an image of God or the sacred which invites us into an external metaphor. Then I suggested we test that metaphor to see if it can carry internal dimensions of God for us too; whether it can then help us understand more how the ‘kingdom within us’ operates.
Then the scene is set for the dance of life and for us to be dancers within it.
Susan
