“Not only is hearing in the church to bear a relationship to hearing in the world, the former needs actually to be guided by the latter. The mystery of God was being communicated in the world, through creation and in the lives of men and women, long before religion came into being. In fact it was the hearing of God in the world that gave rise to religion. In the Christian tradition we may claim a two-thousand-year tradition of hearing God in the mysteries of word and sacrament. It needs always, however, to be set in the context of the fifteen-billion-year tradition of God speaking in creation.”
~J. Philip Newell, Promptings from Paradise

Each of us has a dominant way of receiving the information that comes our way every day. Some people do this visually, others in an auditory way. Still others take in the information and make sense of it through what is known as a kinesthetic way, through touch and our other senses. These are often known as ‘hands on’ learners. I am sure there are those who take things in in a purely intellectual way or through the various ways in which our brains make order in a linear way, those who may excel at math or even science.

I know myself to be primarily a visual learner. I am always looking and taking things in, making sense of the world by the way it ‘looks’ to me. In this dominant way, I create stories and understand the way things work by how I see them. Which is why the words above of John Philip Newell, so jumped out and grabbed me as I read them yesterday. I had to stew over them, even try to ‘translate’ them into my own visual language.

Particularly at this time of the church year, we read the prologue to the Gospel of John about the ‘Word’ coming into the world. This Word refers to Jesus. This scripture is often read as an affirmation of this presence of God whose coming into the world we celebrate at Christmas. However, too often we equate the Word and word, as in scripture words, as the same. But this is not the case.

Yesterday, I thought a lot about Newell’s assertion that it was the hearing of God in the world that gave rise to religion. I would also assert that it is in the seeing and the sensing, the smelling and the tasting that we know the mystery of God in the world. That these experiences also inform what we came to create as religion(s). It is just that in many religions we sometimes forget the context of Creation in an effort to make our faith story and practice all about humanity. This says more about us than, perhaps, about God. Have you had this experience?

Christmas, and its celebration, tends to focus us so squarely on the human aspect of the Holy, that it is easy to forget that our story as people of faith, as people who walk the earth for that matter, has a much longer history than the story of the birth of Jesus. It is easy to be so fixated on the telling of Emmanuel, God-With-Us, that we lose sight of the story in which God has been with us since the beginning of any time we conscious ones can remember and repeat. Sometimes in flesh and blood experiences and sometimes in the encounter with bushes full of fire, waters that part, in mountains that stand strong and tall. Or other times in bread that falls from the sky, in stars that guide the way, in sheep and cattle that quietly stand watch, and in the total silence that engulfs a landscape and a wandering people.

All these are ways in which those with eyes and ears and noses and skin, came to know the brush of Mystery in their every day living, and continue to have those experiences today. It is the way in which I also imagine Jesus came to know the movement of the Sacred in his life. I imagine it is why he told stories of sheep that graze and fish that swim, of birds that fly and flowers that grow. In the telling he connected Word and word……for hearing, for seeing, for smelling, tasting and touching.

After all, it takes the fullness of being human to experience the fullness of a Creator who formed and breathed the whole of Creation into this beautiful life, this holy living.