By every word

By Galen L. Goldsmith

About 50 years ago the world was thought to be solid, substantial, concrete, constituted of things–however tiny or huge–that can be measured and quantified and therefore each thing had its properties and limits. Even the atmosphere of earth as far as the eye can see, great though it is, had its limits. Limits described the conditions in which all things existed. It looked insoluble because who could orchestrate all the systems of nature and humanity so they functioned in a self-sustaining and inherently unlimited way?

Now it was about 70 years ago that a very unusual thing took place. The event was God speaking to a human being in such a way as to enter history and alter the very trajectory of human evolution. This took place in a historical moment and place, but it had in it something, or more properly Someone, whom humanity finds indefinable, unquantifiable, unlimited, unifying, and indivisible, and yet Who is always with everyone. That Someone keeps promises that we neglect or forget or abandon until we remember and return, and this one Relation orchestrates all relationships.

This Someone spoke to one of us who listened, and said: \”My name is Love.\” It was a still small voice just like the one that spoke to Elijah in I Kings 19:11,12. The listener found it good to live with Love. But Love was a demanding friend, and before long, the listener found it necessary to atone for life’s mistakes and to have a pure heart and to cease from doing evil and learn to do well. Almost three years later, Love again caught the listener’s attention heavenward to make it clear that during all that time, the Speaker had been present, and not only that, but had been so unerring about loving that the listener always knew it was truly love. Then the listener began to see also, and saw Christ Jesus overthrow the tables of the moneychangers in the temple of consciousness, setting right the most awful wrong as if it never had been. Love’s power was founded on wisdom, not force. The seer then saw these words written in heaven, I AM WHO I AM–meaning of course that Love loves. Those words were also told to Moses in Ex. 3:14, which meant that Love was really Someone in a big way. The listener and seer was therefore already convinced when the still small voice added, \”I am God.\” The limits of the blue sky disappeared before the seer’s gaze, like a veil drawn aside, to reveal the home of God called heaven. The invisible Speaker abides at the center of hosts of creation, who all testify to the perfect peace, order, beauty and goodness of their Creator.

That listener and seer was held in that moment and became that event until one day—there was nothing left but the event itself. A window in heaven opened on earth that pours forth blessedness without limits, and we, now changed, live.