In keeping with my previous post ...

Nineteenth-century educator Charlotte Mason believed that much of learning in life happened through the "science of relations" -- we "connect" with some new idea, then we begin to recognize that idea in other things we hear or read; the idea becomes more meaningful to us, and we develop a lasting connection with it.

After my previous post (the poem), I ran across the following passage in Ken Gire's book, "Windows of the Soul" (highly recommended!). It was definitely a moment of "the science of relations" for me.

A story is told of a pagan who asked a rabbi, "Why did God speak to Moses from the thornbush?" For the pagan thought God should have spoken instead in a peal of thunder on the peak of some majestic mountain. The rabbi answered, "To teach you that there is no place on earth where God's glory is not, not even in a humble thornbush." Can we see the divine humility in the way that word of God was spoken?

Can we see the even greater humility when the word of God was spoken in the middle of the night through the splayed legs of a teenage girl in the barnyard stench of a stable, where divine eloquence was reduced to the whimper of a child?

But why was the word of God so spoken? Why then? Why there?Why in that way?

To teach us, I think, that there is no time, no place, no event so earthly that God cannot be there, speaking through them. These moments where earth is crammed with heaven, these Bethlehem moments where something divine is birthed through very human wombs, will go unnoticed unless we realize the meek and unassuming way that God characteristically comes.

If we are to see the divine artist's soul mediated through the lesser things of flesh and blood, field and stream, flute and drum, we must look for windows in places we are unaccustomed to looking ...."

Both the poem and this passage speak to the same idea, I think -- an idea which God seems to continually be putting before me.