Sometimes what a person gets from a course, a sermon, an event, isn't what the deliverer(s) anticipate or expect.  I think this is proving the case for me with this Ignatian course I'm doing.

Yesterday we were looking at images of God - very interesting session, some ideas I might pinch - and then invited to 'do' a Lectio Divina with a song by Bernadette Farrell called 'God Beyond Our Dreams':

God, beyond our dreams, you have stirred in us a memory,
you have placed your powerful spirit in the hearts of humankind.

All around us, we have known you;
all creation lives to hold you,
In our living and our dying
we are bringing you to birth.

God, beyond all names, you have made us in your image,
we are like you, we reflect you, we are woman, we are man.

God, beyond all words, all creation tells your story,
you have shaken with our laughter, you have trembled with our tears.

God, beyond all time, you are laboring within us;
we are moving, we are changing, in your spirit ever new.

God of tender care, you have cradled us in goodness,
you have mothered us in wholeness, you have loved us into birth.

Three lines struck me, and as I worked with them I doodled the above ...

You are labouring within us

You are bringing us to birth

We are bringing you to birth

Not only, then, a God as midwife image, or even God as mother image, but also God birthed in us (making each of us in some sense a theotikos, god-bearer) or by us.  A kind of perichoretic interplay of divine and human, glimsped most fully in Jesus the Christ, yet present in every human...

Doodling isn't for everyone, I won't be inflicting on anyone any time soon, but for me, it's helpful, if not even remotely Ignatian!