Ponder this wonderful thought from this month’s Weavings e-newsletter written by Deborah Smith Douglas and adapted from “Feathers on the Breath of God,” Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XXV, No. 4, (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 2010), 6-12.:
Hildegard of Bingen, a fourteenth century mystic, wrote that when her spirit flew, it was not because of anything in herself, but because God bore her up. She floated effortlessly, totally surrendered in perfect trust—a feather on the breath of God.
Living as feathers on the breath of God is not, ultimately, something any of us—even the greatest saints—achieve. It is not an invitation, but a fact. That is the alarming reality of our situation: we really are (all our frantic illusions to the contrary notwithstanding) that vulnerable, that precarious, that radically not in control. But we are also that safe, that intimately close to the Breath that created, redeems, and sustains the universe in love.
O to know ourselves as a feather on the breath of God.