What if God is joy?
What if the Father is bliss and the Son is gratitude
and the Holy Spirit is gleeful wonder?
What if creating is God’s play,
and the big bang was an outburst of happiness
and the galaxies are spun from pure delight?
What if gravity, that holds the universe together,
is simply the pleasure of harmony,
and every created thing’s ecstatic desire for one another?
What if earth is God’s great celebration,
spinning and dancing and making music and beauty
and inviting everyone in to feast and wonder?
What if being itself is such a miracle
that God gets endless enjoyment out of it?
What if God doesn’t own a throne (most uncomfortable)
and has never handled a gavel,
but has a million musical instruments?
What if God goes to hell every weekend
with a load of tissues and listens to everybody
who’s locked themselves up in there
until they’ve cried out all their sorrows,
and they come out laughing and dancing?
What if what it means to come to God
is to enter into God’s joy?
What if the work of justice
is to enable everyone to truly know joy?
(And would that not mean that cruelty and injustice
are most heinously sinful?)
What if even in our grief and our despair
the root of our being is joy,
and resurrection means passing through our sorrow
into God’s delight?
What if salvation means
being rescued from our inability to rejoice?
Why not? Why not? Do you think you can convince me
that God is all somber and serious?
What if even now, as you consider this,
and think it’s kind of silly,
God is laughing… and waiting?
__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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