St Benedict's- Feb 6th : Squares

 Feb 6

In this rich retreat environment, ideas just percolate to the surface.  Today I’m challenging myself to take only square pictures.  I just read, The Cube: Keep the Secret by Annie Gottlieb and I have cubes on my mind. Fascinating book, by the way.

I just wandered around and looked. All these photos are taken on my iPhone and it has a handy square mode. I've never used it but it was handy for this exercise.

So each photo today is taken in square mode and minimal cropping was done.  More often we compose pictures in landscape or portrait mode, especially in a natural setting such as this.  

But I like thinking, “What exactly is in this square field of vision?”

A man's head perhaps.

Where do I try to put my God into a square, into a nice neat box?  A box is easy to draw- school age children learn to draw a three dimensional box. Like an old parlor trick, impressive but ultimately, well-

child’s play.  It’s easy to wrap our minds around a god who stays inside our lines.



We live in the world of square- equality is exalted and spaces with four matching sides, like houses and cubicles, define our boundaries.  We put our god in a box and declare the boundaries of our dogmas and doctrines set.


But God fills our squares anyway- up to the very edges with Himself and then, the very fullness of God pushes the boundaries of our tight, safe spaces. He doesn’t tear down our stable parallelograms. He waits until we are discontent and calls us from beyond to the wide open spaciousness of Himself.

My word to day is spacious- this is a spacious place.

synonyms:

roomy, capacious, palatial, airy, sizable, generous, large, big, vast, immense;

 I look across the valley at the mountains beyond but more than that- there is sense of possibility and openness here.  God is big here in this sacred valley.

What if God has a heart that can't be contained? 

What if His view is the wide open and so much bigger than we can imagine? 

What if.....there are no walls?