I learned a new
word this week: apophenia, meaning
the perception of connections or meaning in unrelated or random phenomena. For
example, some people would say that seeing the image of Christ in the form of
Jesus on the top crust of a grilled cheese sandwich is an instance of
apophenia.
In that
particular instance, those people would be wrong, of course. As Paul says, “He
(Christ) is before all things, and in him all things are held together” (1 Col
17). God is incarnate in the world through Christ, and thus there is no
disconnect between Christ and anything that exists. Christ is sort of like our
DNA; we generally aren’t consciously aware of it, but it is always present in
our body nonetheless. Any perception of separation from Christ is false. When
we awaken from this illusion of separation, we are like Jacob, who, when he
awoke from his dream, proclaimed, “Truly the Lord is in this spot, although I
did not know it!” (Gen 28:16).
When we do come
to know that the Lord is in this spot—is in every
spot—we become transformed people. Apophenia may exist when we see a horse’s
head in a cloud formation or an archer in the stars of a distant galaxy, but it
is not a word that applies to Christ, who is all in all.
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