During our ministry retreat, Rev. Ray Tetrault invited us to move beneath the turmoil of politics, beneath the struggle of winning or losing elections, to the place where all that we value finds its roots. He called it “latent divinity.” I knew that he meant what I have been calling the Mystery Seed. Sometimes we get caught up in words, but at our retreat we were not worrying about that. We were letting ourselves go to the deeper place that Ray was invoking. Latent divinity is like a spark of the sacred, hidden inside each of us, burning like a glimmer of light and beauty and possibility.

I had written in my email to my family, “I believe that the presence of God is in every being on earth, every shoreline, every tree, every rainfall, every turtle, every person.  Even the word God is incomplete. The doors of my heart have expanded open like that. We are all bright sparks of light.” 

Photo by Margy Dowzer

In the silence of the retreat, I could feel that spark in my heart, that Mystery Seed of life and love. I could imagine that seed of divinity in every person alive, pulsing to grow, laboring to be born, and I realized just a glimpse of how beautiful we are. In that place of Mystery, we are all connected, and anything is possible. In that place of Mystery, there is hope for the problems facing our world.

I could also feel how the seed of divinity in me was surrounded by an old husk of separation and division. I was attached to that old husk, that part of me that needs to feel separate from others. That old husk didn’t want to be connected with those who disagreed with me, or to see divinity in people who believed differently from me. I just wanted my side to win. But in order for divinity to grow in me, I would have to let go of the husk of separation.