Sparks

I Thought I Was a Spark

I once wrote about being a spark.

Not a steady flame. Not a raging fire.
Just a spark—fleeting, potent, alive in the moment.

It was how I had come to understand my presence in the world.

Not by what I could build, change, or leave behind,
but by whether I could be true to the moment I was given.

I still hold that understanding.
But recently, another thought began to unfold.

Science is God’s work illuminated.

We discover what was there long before we learned to see it.
We take what we discover, make something from it, and call it ours.

But the work was already there. We had only learned to illuminate it.

After all, there is no invention without discovery.

And then I began to wonder whether the illumination itself was also God’s work, unfolding through us.
The more I sat with that thought, the more I began to see a distinction.

Curiosity illuminates. But illumination does not determine what we do with what we discover.

The same light can help us find our way or reveal something we can exploit.

Coherence orients that illumination toward Life.
And that orientation is our choice.

Life Is a Gift

That brought me back to something I have been holding for a while.

Life is received, held, and given. Always.

We do not create Life.
We receive it.

And a gift does not need to be repaid.

Returning a gift to its Giver would make it an exchange.
But a gift can be passed forward.

Perhaps that is what living coherently means. Not trying to repay what we have received, but allowing what has been given to flow through us toward Life.

Not because we owe it.
Because we remember it was a gift.

Coherence Is Return

I had also been thinking about coherence as something we work toward, something we have to build.

But what if coherence is not something we construct?

What if it is a return to communion that has always been there?

We arrive in a world already shaped by those who came before us.
We inherit relationships, beliefs, practices, and systems.

Some hold Life. Others have forgotten what they were meant to hold.

And we inherit that forgetting too.

At first, forgetting may be something we do.
Over time, it becomes something that happens.
Eventually, we can be born into a forgetting we never chose.

Yet communion has not disappeared. We have forgotten.
And remembering makes return possible.

Forgetting happens. Return is chosen.

The Spark

And that left me with another thought.

How do we choose to return to something we have forgotten?

Something has to remind us.
Sometimes it is hunger.
Sometimes loss.

Sometimes a discovery, a conversation, a moment of clarity,
or another person whose life reminds us of something we had forgotten about our own.

We do not always choose those moments.

They arrive.
And something awakens.

That is the spark.

It is given, not chosen.
What follows is ours to choose.

A spark awakens remembering.

Remembering makes return possible.
Coherence orients us toward Life.
And Life flows forward through what we give.

I began to recognize that science could be one of those sparks.
So could faith. So could another human being.

Each illuminating something that had been there all along.

We Are the Spark

I started with the idea of a spark, and I thought I was one.

Something I carried. Something I might offer to illuminate the way for someone else.
But following this thread brought me somewhere I had not expected.

If coherence is a return to communion, and communion has never left us, then the spark was never mine to possess.

I have been reminded by others, just as I may have reminded someone else.
We awaken remembering in one another.

Not because any one of us holds the light, but because Life was never ours alone.

I thought I was a spark.
Now I remember that We are the spark.