Wisdom's
visitations brought the divine mind to new generations and new circumstances. This divine mind was God's logos
, God's word, or rationale, or conversation, or story. Wisdom reveals God's word. When the author of the Gospel
of John wrote the prologue, he revised a hymn to Wisdom. "In the beginning was Wisdom, and Wisdom was with God,
and Wisdom was God, she was in the beginning with God, and without her was not anything made that was made. In her was
life, and the life was the light of all." This is precisely what Proverbs said about Wisdom, and John identified
Jesus with this Wisdom by connecting Jesus the person with the Logos of God whom Wisdom brought to each generation. For John,
and for the church for centuries following, Jesus is the Wisdom of God become incarnate, as did Lady Wisdom, to reveal to
a new generations the Mind of God.
The revelation
of God continues throughout time. God, precisely as a living and active God, continues to act, to renew, to recreate,
to create anew. Jesus, again in John's gospel, acknowledges this: "I still have many things to say to you, but
you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth." Revelation unfolds
over time as we humans have need and capability to hear, as the Spirit guides. The Spirit of God, like Wisdom, comes
to us to help us see and know God in our own peculiar circumstances. Since we must seek God in circumstances the Scriptures
could never have imagined, we need the Spirit of God, the Wisdom of God, to guide and direct us in all the intricacies and
confusions of our own times.
The doctrine
of the Trinity, so important to contemplation, affirms that God continues to reveal God's self through the divine energies
that God has planted in the created universe. The Creator (the Father) sent the divine Wisdom to take on our human nature
and to open the physical universe to a knowledge and experience of God. Once that physical world was opened again to
God by the Work of Jesus, the Wisdom of God, then the Creator could send the Holy Spirit to sanctify the world in all its
particularity and individuality. In other words, the work of the incarnation of Jesus was to join heaven to earth so
that earth might see heaven and heaven be revealed in earth. Jesus joined human to God, so that God could be manifest
in human and human might strive to become divine. In a sense, this is a generic work: through the incarnation the spiritual
world could once again be seen in the material world.
What
the incarnation did generically, the Spirit achieves in particularity. The world, newly opened to the knowledge and
experience of the divine energies, must be sanctified in every fiber of its individuality and peculiarity. Not just
"human beings" are sanctified, but this human being (myself) in these particular circumstances at this precise time.
This is the work of the Spirit through all of time, to continue the knowledge and experience of the divine in each and every
person, relationship, and circumstance in creation.
The Trinity draws us into
the divine life. We are caught up into the Trinity as we engage in searching for God in creation, as we experience the
divine energy in the material world redeemed by the Son of God, and as we seek to sanctify every thought, action, and relationship.
The Trinity continues to reveal itself as we live in the divine energies. "In the beginning was Wisdom, and Wisdom
was with God, and Wisdom was God, she was in the beginning with God, and without her was not anything made that was made.
In her was life, and the life was the light of all."
