The "Drawing" Power of Creation

Some of the writers in the mystical traditions urge us to turn away from creation to experience God in the formless interior silence.  The writer of the Cloud of Unknowing advises this.  While he lauds the worthiness of "lesser" thoughts, it is his argument that one must aim "higher" to the cloud of unknowing, that which is beyond thought and "pound at it" to move ever closer and into the cloud.  

Other authors, however, write about how God may be experienced through the contemplation of creation, the physical universe of which we also are a part.  Today's reading on "The Episcopal Cafe" for Monica, Mother of Augustine, suggests one such experience. In the quoted excerpt from The Confessions, Augustine, describes an experience which he shared with his mother, just before her death in which they were discussing and trying to imagine what the life of the world to come would be like.  I will indulge in an extended quote:

"...we laid the lips of our hearts to the heavenly stream that flows from your fountain, the source of all life which is in you, so that as far as it was in our power to do so we might be sprinkled with its waters and in some sense reach an understanding of this great mystery. As the flame of love burned stronger in us and raised us higher towards the eternal God, our thoughts ranged over the whole compass of material things in their various degrees, up to the heavens themselves, from which the sun and the moon and the stars shine down upon the earth. Higher still we climbed, thinking and speaking all the while in wonder at all that you have made. And while we spoke of the eternal Wisdom, longing for it and straining for it with all the strength of our hearts, for one fleeting instant we reached out and touched it."

Pseudionysius similarly writes:

"Hence, with regard to the supra-essential being of God–transcendent Goodness transcendently there–no lover of the truth which is above all truth will seek to praise it as word or power or mind or life or being. No. It is at a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity the totality of existence. And yet, since it is the underpinning of goodness, and by merely being there is the cause of everything, to praise this divinely beneficent Providence, you must turn to all of creation. It is there at the center of everything and everything has it for a destiny. It is there "before all things and in it all things hold together." Because it is there the world has come to be and exists. All things long for it. The intelligent and rational long for it by way of knowledge, the lower strata by way of perception, the remainder by way of the stirrings of being alive and in whatever fashion befits their condition."

I do not want to stray into murky territories of "scientific creationism" or arguments for God's existence, e.g. "design requires a designer," yet there is a "drawing" power, it seems, in the contemplation of the physical universe. The way of interior silence and formlessness may indeed be a way to the mystery of God, but as a sometime scientist and "amateur" naturalist, I find myself "drawn" to the beauty and mystery of the physical universe.  Our cathedral dean, in his sermon this Sunday, commented that "like so much of our faith," we find so much that is paradoxical.  We may experience God in the interior formless silence, but we may also find the numinous in the "longing" of creation as well.