Carlo Carretto, an Italian member of the Little Brothers of Jesus community once wrote in one of his books that one doesn't need to look for extraordinary things in order to find God and experience God's beauty and divinity, that the beauty of God is no secret.  You only have to look at a flower or watch a sunset.  Carretto is right.  We are surrounded by the breathtaking beauty and wonder of Divine Presence.  When we look at God's creation, we find ourselves confronted with so vast an energy that no limit can be imagined for it.  A look at Creation and the millions of truth secreted in the wonders of nature and the depths of humanity's own being provides the clearest indication of the scale of the power of the One who has created it; for the rich and complex order of being admits of no other explanation.  I am a nature lover, for this is an unfailing source of comfort for me and I am deeply convinced that the infinite power of God has no clearer proof than that furnished by the study and examination of the phenomena of the created universe and the multiple forms and colorations of nature that can never be fully described.

Four years ago, I had a chance to visit Italy.  The Italian landscape is so lovely that it made me think that maybe one of the many factors why Italy is blessed with so many saintly persons is because of the solemn presence of God as orchestrated in the loveliness of Italian countryside.  They are surrounded by rich array of God's beauty and divinity, which they are always reminded of.  The fields of golden ripe wheat, the meadows covered by multicolored blooms of springtime, the opulent display of rich colors of autumn and the emotional imagery of wintertime.  All these natural phenomena are filled with imprints of Divinity as if proclaiming loudly how great, how beautiful the Creator is.

I believe that the beauty and bounty of Creation enriches one's spirituality.  Spirituality, by the way, as mentioned by Matthew Fox, is a life-filled path, spirit-filled way of living.  Perhaps another way of putting in my own words is our aliveness in our participation with the interplay of events in our daily life as we perform our role in the big drama of Creation.  There is something very personal in me that was touched by these thoughts of Matthew Fox:

"A path has something personal about it; it implies choice or even mystery. To choose a path is to reject another.  A path is a meandering walkway – you do not rush or even drive down a pathway.  A path is not goal-oriented.  A path is the way itself, and every moment on it is a holy moment, a sacred seeing goes on there..."

These words bring an awareness of the path that I am treading at the moment.  I am referring to my present situation, which is way far from the original life-project that I engaged before.  At present, the uncertainties of the future are staring at me on this path.  I have the tendency to be goal-oriented and it seems that I cannot ascertain what this path is leading me to. But a part of me is still hoping… eager to reach the summit of this journey, to see myself one day celebrating my own personal victory.  The words of Matthew Fox seem to comfort me.  He mentioned willingness to learn and let go, the need to be emptied to be able to walk on the pathway of Spirituality.  How beautiful, how gentle is the way of Spirituality!  In my frantic effort to align myself this pathway, I run the risk of overlooking the holy moments, of forgetting that a sacred seeing must take place.  There’s a lot that I must learn in this journey.  I feel that this path is inviting me to move away from superficiality into authenticity; from being individualistic into communitarian; from the “outer” to the “inner” person; from self-centeredness to other-centeredness.  I realized that my life’s journey should bring me to awareness – that I am not alone in this path.  I am also sharing the pain and the struggle with all the others on the way, to those who like me, are also searching for meaning and purpose, for the Divine Presence, that shines within us.