Supernatural

I've discovered an error in my thinking. (I'm sure there are many more.) When re-reading something I'd written recently about Communion, I found that I used the word "supernatural" to describe God's workings in the world. It struck me that this is downright silly; the world is of God, after all, which means that drawing a line between a tree and a miracle is to get things exactly backward. The miracle appears to flow from God's supernatural intervention, in other words, only because we have grown accustomed to thinking of the tree as something that doesn't spring from God.

A very fine book by Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, confirmed my realization. Schmemann decries the artificial distinction between the sacred and the secular, by which churches themselves too often ghettoize God. "All that exists," he writes, "is God's gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man's life communion with God."

Using the term "supernatural" reinforces a Gnostic tendency to view the stuff of the world as inconsequential, and the stuff of the hidden realms as where the action is. To be sure, God is supernatural in that He, the Creator, is above the created thing. But we usually employ this word to speak of events or attributes, and when we do this we sound no different from pagans who believe in ghosts and goblins, beings that can influence this world but are fundamentally disconnected from it.

However, our very world and life---our nature, in other words---is drawn from God. What is left, then, of the supernatural? Only the Creator, the Being about whom we are in error when we speak of Him as having a nature, such that the theologically picky among us choose instead to speak of His essence. God Himself is above nature, and yet perhaps even that is a misconception, for the Holy Spirit dwells with and in man, and the Son took on fully the body of man. God has, in other words, transcended even the natural/supernatural divide, so that those of us on this side of the veil might be afforded entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.

But in the end I suppose such fine distinctions don't matter much to most people. What does matter is that we walk as if surrounded by sacredness, as if our very bodies are created in the image of God, which they are, and which I most of all am prone to forget, until a sunset or the giggle of a child reminds me that the supernatural is here, is present, is God with us. "The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein."