In Matins of the Dead the words of the invitatory run: Deum, cui omnia vivunt, venite adoremus— “To God, all things are alive; O come, let us adore him”.
All things, not all men; the body, which is dead to us, is still alive to God. Every particle of that dust is still obedient to his creative will; the same Power that once gave it freedom of movement, is now exercised to imprison it in stillness; the same law which once ordained its growth now dooms it to decay. That, after all, is the astonishing fact; nothing can exist away from God, everything must, of necessity, come from him and tend to him. As the circle exists because each point on the circumference is in a particular relation to its centre, so the universe exists because everything in it is in a particular relation to God. As the satellites revolve round their planet, so everything in its creation keeps its place there by keeping its proper distance from God, who is its sphere. As the flowers open to the sun from which their vigor has returned to them, so in the natural and in the supernatural order all things turn continually towards God, who is their sun. All things are alive to God, react to him.
Do you doubt it? Then watch the actions of the Son of God, listen to the words of the Son of God, when he came to earth. You are crossing an inland sea in an open rowing-boat; suddenly, lashed by the draught that comes down through the funnel of those hills, the water rises about you in mountainous waves, tossing the boat from crest to crest, terrifying. They seem, those waves, to have all the greed and the fury of wild beasts; you have the illusion that the whole purpose of their ravening is to overwhelm this particular craft, in which you are voyaging.... Ah, if that were only so! Living beasts might be amenable to some trick of human mastery; these waves are senseless things; there is no art by which a human will can impose itself on them. But, wait a moment. One of your fellow-passengers rises from the bows of the boat, where he lay asleep; looks out over those roaring billows as if they were a sea of children who had become too noisy over their play. With the tired but calm voice of a grown-up who knows how to deal with children, he says, “Peace, be still.” And there is a dead hush instantly; a hush, almost, of expectancy, as if that noisy company were waiting to hear what game they should play next.
If Jesus Christ spoke on that occasion, it was for our sakes. He was thinking aloud, as a man will talk to some mechanical contrivance when he is explaining the nature of it to a set of pupils. The wind and the sea had no ears, to catch his human accents, nor any need of them. His will imposed itself directly on the forces of nature around him. You see, he was God. He said to the fig-tree, “Let no man eat fruit of thee henceforward,” and it withered in a day. More curiously, when St. Peter's mother-in-law was prostrated by fever, he did not say anything to her; he rebuked the fever, and it left her. On those special occasions, he put his thought into words, but the same thing was happening, all the time. Everything was alive to him; it is hardly a metaphor, when Crashaw sums up for us the miracle at Cana of Galilee in the words, “The shame-faced water saw its Lord, and blushed.” Never a miracle but demonstrates to us, how faithfully and how readily material things obeyed him. Even the devils, though they came out reluctantly, came out at his command. It was only when he sought to impose his will on us human creatures that he encountered resistance. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I would have gathered thee.... Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?”
Let us remind ourselves of the obvious truth that the same thing is happening all over the world, and indeed in every corner of creation. A whole universe attentive at every moment to God's voice, at every moment alive to God, all of it except us, his children. Let us put it to ourselves more forcibly, by reminding ourselves that even that is only true where our conscious wills are concerned. Our bodies—they are alive to God all right. If you yawn in church, that may mean that your mind is not being attentive, but your body is being attentive to the Divine will; each muscle reacts as God tells it to react. And I suppose the same is true, when you come to think of it, of our unconscious minds. If some memory intrudes itself upon your thoughts, a dangerous memory, which he allows to tempt you, a gracious memory, which he sends to inspire you, what exactly is happening inside you? This: that your unconscious memory, alive to God's voice, has been searching about in its lumber-room for the exact thing he wanted it to find. Only later, only when your conscious mind comes into play, does the temptation become a test at which you fail, the inspiration a grace with which you, somehow, do not correspond. Could anything be more humiliating to us than this spectacle of a listening universe in which we, and we only, are deaf to the Divine call?
St. Paul tells us that it ought to be otherwise; indeed (for he has a disconcerting trick of talking to us as if we already were what he wants us to be) St. Paul tells us that it is otherwise. Partakers of the Resurrection, we must reckon ourselves “alive to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Alive to God—what do the words mean, when you apply them not to the body but to the soul, not to the unconscious but to the conscious mind? Go to the theologians, and they will tell you that every Christian soul is alive to God unless it is, at the moment, in a state of mortal sin. Yes, I suppose that's true. Let's paint for ourselves an imaginary portrait; please God, only imaginary. The portrait of a man who is just alive to God, and no more. It's some months now since he was at confession, but during that interval, more from the absence of temptation than from any fixed purpose of the will, he hasn't committed any mortal sin. He's been to Mass on Sundays, even put something in the plate; his children go to an excellent school, and he takes off his hat to the priest when he meets him. Beyond that, he doesn't do anything about it, and he doesn't mean to do anything about it. Pray? Why should he? Go into retreat? Oh dear, no. His last end? That'll have to look after itself. Charitable appeals? Well, there's always the waste-paper basket. Yes, quite true, he's not in mortal sin, and if he dies tonight I suppose we shall have to record that fact on his tombstone; it's difficult to see what other inscription we can devise. But—is such a man really alive?
