THE SENSUOUSNESS OF GOD

"THE SENSUOUS IS SACRED. FOR TOO LONG in the Christian tradition we have demonized the sensuous and pitted the 'dim senses' against the 'majestic soul'. This turned God into an abstract ghost, aloof and untouchable; and it made the senses the gateways to sin. But the world is the body of God. Hopkins is the great poet of God's beauty. He writes:

Glory be to God for dappled things. . .
All things counter, original, spare, strange; . . .
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

"Everything can be an occasion of God. The elemental presence of the divine is everywhere: wind, water, earth and fire witness to the urgency, passion and tactility of God. From these elements God fashioned the universe. It is not that God is reduced to a force of nature or that aspects of nature become mere images of God. Nature is divine raiment; the touch and flow and force of God touches us here but the divine presence is not exhausted by this.

"Both sensuousness of nature and our senses make the divine presence visible in the world. Nature was the first scripture, and at the heart of Celtic spirituality is this intuition: to be out in nature is to be near God. When we begin to awaken to the beauty which is the Sensuous God, we discover the holiness of our bodies and our earth.

--John O'Donohue, Beauty, The Invisible Embrace. Harper Collins, 2004