Interpenetrated by God – I picked up that phrase from one of those master mystics who still heard the original message of Christianity sometime before 400 CE, even though the mystic lived many centuries later. Or the phrase could be from our contemporary, Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing, among many other books.

But that phrase: interpenetrated by God reverberates in me and niggles me deeply enough to arrive in my dreams too. What does it really mean? Perhaps it resonates differently with each human who hears it, but since I believe God is in everything and everything is in God, that word interpenetration strikes me as true.  God, for me, is Great Mystery, the big bang, or the long breath, endless exhale perhaps, picking up on Jude Currivan’s perspective in her book: The Story of Gaia – The Big Breath and the Evolutionary Journey of our Conscious Planet. I understand interpenetration by God to mean awareness of being embedded in the moment to moment experience of interacting with being alive: moving, deciding, speaking, sighing, eating, drinking, eliminating, seeing, blinking, sleeping,– every bit of me breathing, thirsting, hungering, tearing up, arm skin goose-bumping, spontaneously smiling, engaging with and responding to this living body to which I belong, this living body that contains my awareness, constantly in motion, responding and reacting to what is happening without and within without much thinking about it.

Impossible to be alive without interfacing with everything in our domain:

*It could be waking to a neighbor’s rooster crowing with the dawn,
*responding to the dog ripping up paper nabbed from the kindling bin when I’m not looking,
*a pang of hunger in my belly, wondering what food’s available, wandering to the cupboard to look,
*the sudden need to detour when walking the above mentioned dog because we’ve spotted a posse of ten dogs and only two handlers and the one on my leash is unpredictable around other dogs,
*running in the house when clouds burst with a torrent of water,
*my hand leaping back after touching the slime of a hidden-from-view slug.

It’s all active response to the world within and the world without which is sourced from the evolutionary Mystery that God has generously provided for 13.7 billion years, allowing us to arrive here on this planet at this time NOW.

My life, your life, our lives, all lives
inextricably interwoven with energetic lines of communication
sprouting all over us like:
 petals on a flower,
a fine mist of water humidifying our cells invisible to the eye,
the bubbles in brine released by fermenting cucumbers,
our noses detecting lilac perfume drifting on a whiff of air –
everything is forming and unforming
endlessly morphing,
living begetting dying begetting living –
 nothing stays the same and
we are enmeshed with all of it
whether we are aware or not.
We engage with life on a moment to moment basis.
Without thinking much about it all,
we are woven into the web of life.
We are interpenetrated by God.

To illustrate this necklace of words, I offer a doodle blessing inspired by the author, Sybil MacBeth in her book: Praying in Color – Drawing a New Path to God