Sunday, October 23, 2005
THE DIVINE CATHOLIC SPARK
I'm still wondering about today's homily. Father talked about all of us having a spark of the divine within us. It was the central theme of his homily and he repeated it several times. I don't recall ever hearing the phrase used in a Catholic setting before today. There is nothing in the index of the CCC about it. In fact, the only place I've heard anything about a divine spark is in Jewish mysticism.
In the teachings of Isaac Luria's Kabbalah, Jewish mystics believe they must help to reunite all of the scattered divine sparks so that the world can be whole again. It's explained better in this website of the son of Holocaust survivors. As he describes it, the divine spark will hardly fit into Catholic cosmology.
So I went looking for Divine Spark on the web. It appears to be a teaching of Orthodox America. There it would seem that the divine spark is merely a zeal for the teachings of God. That isn't what Father was talking about this morning. He was talking about something indwelling our being. Moving on...
In Islam the divine spark is called Taqwah. It amounts to proper fear of God and the ability to understand Him. That would be wisdom, I suppose. But Father wasn't talking about a virtue. He was talking about a thing.
This Spiritist website uses the phrase. I rather suspect that what they are referring to is a disembodied entity. Surely that isn't what Father had in mind, did he? The indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the soul of a man is not quite the same thing as channeling, is it? Oh, surely not!
The Gnostics use the phrase. (Scroll down to the sub-heading "The Human Being".) Here the divine spark is a piece of God.
This website tells me that the Elohim of Fire is a Friend of the Divine Spark. Since I'm not familiar with the Elohim of Fire, it's not a lot of help; and I'm pretty sure I don't want to learn who it is.
Father got rather close to saying that we are God, though he didn't say it. Neither did he indicate that God is "other". I suppose what he thought he was talking about is the soul. He could have said "soul" of course. But he said "divine spark," and he said it a lot, with no explanation, leaving us to interpret his comments for ourselves, it would seem. Interpreting today's homily is more puzzling because I know quite a bit about New Age. One had to fiddle with the meaning of this term in order to give it a Catholic concept, but it was not difficult to put it into an interreligious context, as I've just demonstrated.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
