Seeing God From a Different Perspective

Our life in God is like a prism. Although we can look at it from many different angles, we tend to view it from only one perspective: what it is like to be a human with my particular body, culture, beliefs, and desires.

From time to time in scripture, we see people who are invited to view the prism from a different perspective. It happened to Peter, James, and John when they saw Jesus transfigured and, as Malcom Guite says, “The love that dances at the heart of things / Shone out upon us from a human face.” It happened to the disciples in the midst of a storm when Jesus walked toward them on the water, which led them to proclaim, “Truly, you are the Son of God!” It happened to Mary when she saw an angel who asked if she would be the mother of Jesus and told her, “The power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”

In his book The Lord, Romano Guardini describes such occasions in this way:

“In the midst of everything that [we] may think or experience, in the midst of all that is known as the “world,” there rises a point that does not belong to the world, a place into which one may step, a room one may enter, a power on which one may lean, a love to which one may give oneself. This is reality, a reality different from the reality of the world, more real than the world. Faith is the act of seizing this reality, of building one’s life on it, of becoming a part of it.”

When Mary was invited to consider a different aspect of God—a God who wanted to become flesh and live among us—she saw the truth of this reality and seized it, built her life on it, became a part of it. As we celebrate the Assumption of Mary tomorrow, we can ask her to invest us with her vision, courage, and trust so we too can see how things really are beyond the confines of our human lives and become part of the love that dances at the heart of things.