Images for God — metaphors and visuals that catch something more fundamental and grounded than ideas for God. One pertinent visual is from the Book of Kings where the divinity is imaged as fire. There Yahweh consumes the stones, laps up the water, rescues the Israelites.

It suggested some wonderful writing in a recent book on Creation by Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, Come Have Breakfast, Meditations On God and The Earth (Orbis Books, 2024). There she speaks of the ways that fire has been used to symbolize the living God.

She begins with a quote from Hildegard of Bingen

“I, the highest and fiery power, have kindled every living spark. I flame above the beauty of the fields; I shine in the waters. In the sun, the moon and the stars, I burn… I, the fiery power, lie hidden in these things and they blaze from me.”

Following up on this, Johnson visualizes the Creator as “the creator dwelling within the world like a good warming fire.” And still more graphic: “In the way a flame sets other things on fire, the Divine Source continually sparks all things into being.”

That’s the image which stays with me: a spark which continually ignites, not just us humans but all of creation.

It’s particularly apropos for this summer season with many visiting the ocean and bathing in its waters. Strolling along its shoreline, the beauty of the surroundings can come across as one more outburst of that divine spark. To this day at the beach, I can catch something of that divine flash glinting through the waves on a sunny day — more precisely, in that moment just before it breaks and becomes transparent to the sun shining through it — still further, watching that translucent glow as it rolls on down the sand.

Images more than ideas, visuals more than concepts — capturing some little glint of that divine spark and fire which ignites the world.

Vincent’s sensitivity to poverty in his time would likely carry over to today’s concern for the threats to a beleaguered creation, especially the way in which they are affecting the poor worldwide.