A New Word

To read is to risk running into new words.  It happened again the other day as I was reading a book entitled, "Earth, the Original Monastery," by Christine Valters Paintner.   She wrote, "The word panentheism  comes from the Greek pan (everything), en (in), and theos (God).  It means 'God in all things, pervading everything we see' (this is different from pantheism, which means 'all things are God.')  While God is in all things, God is also wholly other; God is both immanent and transcendent.  Jesus' embrace of the natural world reflects this panentheistic worldview."     

While I had encountered and understood the meaning of pantheism, panentheism is a new word for something I had sensed and understood, but for which I had no word so definitive.  In these years on the farm I have come to a place of experiencing the Creation so differently than I have in years past and sometimes I wondered if, perhaps, I was going off into some deep end which was going to be the undoing of my theological foundation.     

One of the sharp difference in where I am now and where I have been is found in a growing awareness that the Creation is truly a means through which God reveals Himself as well as a means by which we are enabled to hear His Word even as we do when we read the Scripture.  It may be a step too far to take for some, but it is one I found myself taking even before a theological word came to give understanding to what had been taking place in my spiritual journey.