A Thought on Perspective

Friday, 34th Week of the Year

The contrast between the First Reading and Gospel today is striking. Daniel’s vision of the apocalypse includes four immense, terrifying beasts, with horns and teeth and wings and tusks. But Christ in the Gospel describes the Kingdom of God tenderly as a bud bursting open.

While on the surface these two seem opposite, I think the difference is only a matter of perspective. If we could be the size of an ant, or smaller, and could see a bud bursting open before us, with the fibers tearing apart and something new and strange emerging, I would imagine that our experience of fright and terror would not be all that different from Daniel’s.

One of the graces given to the saints is the ability to see the extraordinary within the ordinary. That’s why they often speak and write with such urgency and alarm. They can see what God is up to in the smallest, most mundane moments of history and in individual lives. They see the calamitous Kingdom of God breaking through even the thinnest fissure and are compelled to call our attention to it.

And that is not a grace reserved only for the holiest but one shared with each of us. That we could look at the particularities of our lives and see God at work and alive. Moving within us, and through us, to bring his Kingdom into fuller existence in the world.

We need no better place to begin than with the Eucharist. If in the tiny Host can be contained the Son of Man who Daniel saw coming on the clouds, then cannot everything else likewise be signs of his in-breaking Kingdom? It’s all a matter of perspective.