Sometime back in 2020 I was asked to sit on a panel for middle school students to ask questions about the faith. I was accompanied by our associate pastor and the assistant director for youth ministry and was unqualified for this position considering my company, but I couldn’t resist a microphone. One of the students asked a question that has since stuck with me: “Where do you go, or what do you do when you need to feel God’s presence?” The responses from Father and from Rachel were beautiful – adoration, memorized verses from the Bible, and attending Mass were among the answers. Me? I blushed and answered honestly. “When I need to feel close to God, I turn off all the lights in and around the house. I stand outside in the middle of my yard and look up at the stars.”
Feeling God’s presence for me can only be “on demand” accessed when I am in nature. There is something about the vastness of the view from a mountain peak, the puffy, low clouds stretched out before the open road, or the bright smattering of stars in the Milky Way that instantly makes me feel simultaneously small and important. Inside my chest I get this swelling feeling of an indomitable human spirit. I feel both like clay being molded and that I was made for greatness. Looking at nature gives me a personal feeling of a training montage without the physical pain.
I have been embarrassed about what I considered to be a pagan answer for about six years now. Thankfully, God is merciful, and He found this to be a long enough period of wanting and He has shown up in the Psalms and some work of St. Francis de Sales!
St. Francis de Sales drew my attention to the opening lines of Psalm 19. “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is no heart; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4 RSV2CE)
St. Francis says of David’s words, “Indeed, when on a clear night we contemplate the beauty of the heavens, we do not feel less animated to admire and adore the Omnipotence and Wisdom of God, Who has studded it with such beautiful stars, than when we observe the inaccessible light of the sun in its full meridian splendour. What conclusion are we to draw from all this but that we, who are something more than all the rest of creation (since all things were made for us, and not we for them), should, by our good example, announce the glory of God more perfectly than the heavens and the stars.”
Those two sentences shook me. In my silent obedience to God, reflecting His Love within me, I am to reflect God brighter than a starry night, or beautiful sunrise/sunset. It is through this unforgettable influence that we are called to preach of the Love and Glory of God. Me. Who is riddled with sin and too weak to overcome it… I am called to do this work of being more awesome than the Milky Way. Because God dwells within me.
I invite you this week to preach silently like sunset, and ask God to help you magnify His glory in overcoming a sin that has been pestering you. God, creator of the Universe, decided the world was incomplete without YOU in it. You were made in the image and likeness of God. The sunrises, the shooting stars… They cannot compare to you or the God who dwells within you!