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Scripture~Titus 1.15a (CEV)
15Everything is pure for someone whose heart is pure.
Wisdom Saying
[Y]ou are never alone. Let yourself be plumbed to the depths, and you will realize that everyone is created for a presence. There in your heart of hearts, in that place where no two people are alike, Christ is waiting for you. And there the unexpected happens.
*Roger Shultz, Prior of Taize community, in Melvyn Matthews, Making Room for God
Comments
Mystics speak of a center within us all. In this center we are told we find God. We learn the center, or deepest depth, of Who We Are is everywhere and nowhere.
In the center, the Heart of All Things, we find a stability we cannot find on the edges. This center is the Depth~Within, and we are called to dive into that Mystery.
To enjoy the path of the Christian mystic, or contemplative, means to go against the tide of modern living. Melvyn Matthews, in Making Room for God, writes of this modern preoccupation with surface living:
Modern living forces upon us a dislocation. It makes us live purely on the surface of things, far from our inner truth, far from the Godspace deep within us which is the contemplative center of our being. We are made ... to live from this center. The mystics call us back to this awareness.
This center is not your center or my center. Why? This center is God. God is the Whole in which we each live. God is the Center Who lives within us each. 'God' is a word for this Mystery, this Isness Is-ing, this Being Be-ing.
The result of this experiential union with Everything is a transformation of our spiritual sight. In the words of the Anglican mystic William Law, in "The Baptism of Water and the Baptism of the Spirit":
The truly spiritual person is one who sees God in all things, that sees all things in God, that receives all things as from God, that ascribes all things to God, that loves and adores God in and for all things, in all things absolutely resigned unto God, doing them for God from a principle of pure and perfect love of God. There is no spiritual person but this. Every natural thing has the nature of a sacrament to the spiritual person, as to the pure all things are pure, so to the spiritual person every thing is spiritual. . .
Suggested Reflection
1. What do you do to live in fellowship and union with God, our center, in a culture that encourages dislocation?
2. Do you think your Christian denomination and local church is adequately addressing the need to live from the center, or God? Are they appropriately helping persons live from that center in God? Explain your answers.
3. Reflect on and pray about that startling statement in Titus that all things are pure to those with pure hearts. Does that mean the pure of heart do not see the evil in the world? If not, what might it mean? What does it mean to be pure in heart?
4. Are you sensing a call to make some adjustments in your life to live more fully from the center? Explain.
INVITATION~Persons are invited to request membership in this writer's House of Light, a web village for persons interested in or living a contemplative life. To request membership go to www.7Villiages.com .
See next page for Purpose of OneLife and reference to a couple of the writer's written works; and reference to sources.
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