Dawn comes in the early morning. There is color, life and glory all around. No matter how insensitive the believer is, he cannot help but feel, as the world turns, that the wide open horizons are a living sanctuary where the vibrant activity of the Lord shines through in all its splendor
A group of human beings, a community, a family, all of them can be and in fact they are, true sanctuaries where God lives with great pleasure. His presence is there like a red flame from the hearth; it warms and gives light. There in this warm dwelling, all the gifts are like sparks emanating from the divine fire: the loveliness of a person is none other than the glimmer of the loveliness of God; one’s capacity to serve is none other than the capacity of the Lord to serve. And so it is, that people and groups are sanctuaries, small theophanies, which reverberate the strength and the warmth of God.
Nevertheless, all of these can up and disappear like soap bubbles, wrapped up in misunderstandings. The concept that the world is God’s sacrament, and similar expressions, could be reduced, if we are not attentive, to beautiful literature, or at best, to some beautiful theories
Let us suppose that a heart is dead to God. That person will go through the world and will live among others as if he were blind, deaf and dumb. For him, God will not shine on any horizon, or at any level. God will not speak nor shine from him in any given place. If Christ is alive and vibrant in my heart, I will project the living image of the Lord over the most disagreeable of those belonging to my community and they will become agreeable for me because I will have covered them with the figure of the Lord. On the other hand, if Christ is absent from my heart, this brother or sister in my community will only be a disagreeable and intolerable person to me, and nothing more.
It is not that the creatures are robed magically in a divine light. We are the ones who robe them in this light. When the heart is light, everything around it is luminous. Once more, we conclude that the real sanctuary is always, and exclusively, the heart of man.
How right the Master was— and one can never emphasize this enough in the sense that — when, speaking to the Samaritan woman, He told her that the real sanctuary of adoration was not on mount Gerazim or on Mount Zion, but in another “place”; that it is not really a place, that it is within, the “temple” made of the spirit and truth.
It is not exactly true to state that creatures “awakened God” in Francis of Assisi, but that they spoke to him of God. All this literature, brother sun, and sister stars, etc. could be simply an ambiguous play on words, without being realistic or down to earth.
The truth is that Francis of Assisi, before being the saint of creatures, was the man of the caves. To arrive at this conviction all we have to do is to read his first biographers; even today the truly sacred places of Franciscan’s are in the high mountains
Whenever Francis wanted to be truly alive with the Lord, he abandoned his sister creatures and went deep into the dark caves, where only a small ray of light would penetrate. He would spend hours, days, weeks and even whole months there. From there he would emerge with a heart overflowing with God; it was then that, yes, all the creatures would speak to him of God.
Nevertheless, the reality was not even like that. It was Francis who spread that living God which he carried in his heart everywhere. It was he who robed all the creatures with God. His eyes were the dwelling place of God, and obviously, everywhere those eyes looked was robed with God. Everything spoke to him of God because God dwelled in his heart and his thoughts were occupied with God.
Taken from the book “Psalms for Life” Chapter III “In Spirit and Truth” Subtitled “The Real Sanctuary” of Father Ignacio Larranaga.
