STRUCTURES
As the soul of the artist is reflected in his work of art, so created things reflect God in their inmost structure. Go into the fields in the early morning and notice things – the smells, the colours, the birdsong. In all this there is a reflection of God.
Everything in nature has a trademark, God’s trademark. The stripes on a shell and the stripes on a zebra, the grain of the wood and the veins of the dry leaf, the markings on the dragonfly’s wings and the pattern of stars on a photographic place, the panther’s coat and the epidemis cells of the lily petal, the structure of atoms and galaxies – all bear God’s fingerprints.
There is a style, a divine style in everything that exists, that show that everything was created by the same artist. Everything is multiplicity within unity. Everything is both like other things and individual. Every individual thing has its own manner of being, it is that and not anything else, but at the same time there are millions and millions of others like it, both minute creatures and stars. Everything has its own stripes, speckles, spots, dapples, veins, or grain: the caterpillar, the clay pot, the chameleon, the Klee painting and the Persian carpet, sea spray, stalactites, white agate veins in pebbles, the carpet of autumn leaves, wood and marble.
They all have God’s fingerprints. This is the seal of the Trinity of God, three in one, infinite multiplicity in infinite unity, the unity of what is distinct.
In the image of God who created them, all beings are one and many at the same time, all beings from the galaxy to the electron.
No two caterpillars are alike, no two atoms, no two stars, even though they look the same in the sky at night. But everything also has something in common. Poetry must discover this pattern, this design running throughout creation, and see how even the most different things have likenesses. The mountains skip like rams and the hills like young sheep. Your hair is a flock of goats winding through the mountains of Gilead.
(From LOVE – A glimpse of Eternity by Ernesto Cardenal – Preface by Thomas Merton – Paraclete Press)
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