Prepared by Being: Releasing What Hinders the Sacred Within

Before anything else, we pause.
We breathe.
We allow ourselves to come inside.

In one of her luminous poems, Hildegard of Bingen turns to nature to speak about what it means to be prepared for God:

O green vigour of the hand of God,
in which God has planted a vineyard…
You are glorious in your preparation for God.

Hildegard does not speak of effort, striving, or achievement. She points instead to mountains, trees, and valleys — to creation itself — as living icons of divine presence. Nature does not try to be holy. It simply is. And in that being, God is revealed.

The human person, too, is a manifestation of God. Yet unlike the rest of creation, we have been given free will. We can choose to live as that preparation — or we can forget.

And perhaps the deeper truth is this: it takes far more effort not to be a preparation for God than to be one.

A tree does nothing to become what it is.
A mountain does not labour to stand in glory.
Simply by being themselves, they manifest the sacred.

The same is true for us.

What obscures this truth is not a lack of discipline or devotion, but the layers we accumulate along the way — especially early in life. As children, we learn strategies for surviving disappointment, frustration, rejection, and fear. Over time, these strategies harden into identities. We begin to mistake who we have become for who we truly are.

Much of the world reinforces this confusion. It keeps us externally focused, constantly busy, endlessly productive — workers, consumers, problem-solvers. In that busyness, we rarely turn inward. And so the false protections remain in place, quietly directing our lives.

If there is spiritual work to be done, it is not the work of making ourselves worthy or holy.
It is the work of releasing what hinders the sacred already present.

Nature teaches us this better than anything else. When we sit quietly outdoors — feeling the breeze, noticing the scent of leaves and earth after rain, watching colour and life emerge — something in us remembers. We soften. We feel at home. We sense that this is where we belong.

We often promise ourselves we will return to this way of being. And then we don’t. The demands of the world pull us back into motion, back into distraction, back into forgetting.

Yet the invitation remains.

You are like the mountain.
You are like the stream.
You are already a preparation for God.

The task is not to become something new —
but to gently lay down what has never truly been you.

Glory to you, as you are