My daughter finds deep symbolism in the stressed-looking mother opossum carrying her babies around, and felt the need to express this in clay đŸ˜‰
I was pondering 1 Corinthians 2:9-16 on a train journey a few weeks ago – it’s rather dense text, and so my imagination took a bit of a leap. I’d like to share with you where I ended up. Once again, I wish I were an artist, because these verses conjure up a beautiful image that I struggle to describe in words.
Verse 10 talks about the Spirit who searches everything, even the depths of God, and so we start with the Holy Spirit reaching into the heart of God the Father.
Then in verse 11, we read that the human spirit, deep within us, knows what is truly human – our spirit reaches deep into our hearts.
Verse 12 tells us that we have received the Spirit that is from God, this makes a connection between our heart and the heart of God. The Holy Spirit joins with the spirit of our inner being, bringing us and God into union.
I imagine the Holy Spirit as a sort of dynamic loop of light flowing from the heart of God into our hearts, bringing love and peace. Once inside, the Spirit searches out our inmost being (Psalm 139:1-6), and then flows out of our bodies, bringing all we are living with into the heart of God the Father, where Christ is. This is an unbroken flow of the Spirit between our heart and the heart of God.
This action of the Holy Spirit changes our hearts and changes our minds, to the point that Paul dares to write in verse 16 that ‘we have the mind of Christ’. I am comforted by this intimate image of the love of God the Father being brought into my heart by the Holy Spirit, and that the troubles of my heart are then carried up to Christ in God, who understands me and transforms me.