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Each relationship we share in has a particular Mystery. Each relationship is a sacred adventure. So, we celebrate even the felt vulnerability of the relationship. Within the sense of insecurity of change, we feel deep peace and deep knowing. We enjoy co-creating together. With a person or group, we can grow through respect to the Mystery being and becoming, a blessed familiarity and comfort that brightens days and nights.
With God and all others, the experience of union relies on that prior oneness we already share. Sharing self to self is because we are one prior to our differentiation into separate beings through creation. The sharing is to actualize, consciously, what is unconscious.
Contemplation teaches us, in regard to God, others, and ourselves, to respect the deep unknowingness within us each, the ineffable, which can be loved but never owned or manipulated. True love is beyond all manipulation, though it is not beyond persuasion.
In prayer, as you learn to respect and become more comfortable with the Mystery of All Mysteries, you are teaching yourself to respect and become more comfortable with the Mystery of others you love deeply and share with dearly. This is relational mysticism: the fellowship of sharing in the Mystery of Mysteries together and conscioiusly.
We can only endure the Mystery of God as a conscious union through trust. Likewise, to honor another person living to live out her own mystery is how to be and become one with her, in True Love. In her receiving that trust, she is encouraged to become. In her becoming, you become, for becoming is always a becoming together, in Communion.
You do not allow her to grow; rather, you interpenetrate spiritually her becoming with your being. This is what the New Testament calls koinonia, "participation, fellowship, sharing." The mystery of the other is free, beyond permission from outside. However, you aid her becoming by impulses of loving energy.
Indeed, in the Superessential Being we are so deeply united, being open to the Holy Spirit within is being open to the inherent participation of the other. Then, your presence supports and encourages her growth as Person, naturally and spontaneously. You are more fulfilled, for she is more fulfilled; she is more fulfilled, for you are more fulfilled.
In contemplation we learn to let go of even God-as-we-understand-God, trusting a becoming-from-being free of our permission, yet, aided to arise to consciousness by loving attention and nurture. We, essentially and necessarily, participate through faith in this arising. Faith is being fully in the being and becoming of the moment, of the Godhead, trusting in the essential goodness of the act of God as Goding, or God-as-manifesting: which is the Holy Spirit.
Without this growth in darksome faith, whereby we surrender our God-as-we-understand-God, a faith that sees without seeing, one cannot go far into Divine Love, or in sharing it with others. With this darksome faith, any relationship can be meeting place of spirit with spirit in Spirit.
The extent to which many relationships are stalled and stuck in fear reminds us how much we need the darksome faith of contemplation. If we cannot accept joyfully the mystery of the other, how can we celebrate the Mystery of the Wholly Other?
Indeed, we can receive spiritual blessings of an unexplainable nature through koinonia with the Superessential Being-- through His Glory--or through sharing intimately in spiritual union with another person in Grace flowing from the Indwelling Spirit of Grace.
Says St. Bernard of Clairvaux (b. 1090), one of the Church Fathers, "Perhaps faith sometimes receives what prayer is not bold enough to ask for." Yes, and possibly, sometimes, we must live into a rich blessing of union and sharing that we could not pray for, for we did not know it possible for a human or, at least, not possible for one like us.
*Quote from St. Bernard, Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, Trans. G. R. Evans, "The Classics of Western Spirituality."
OneLife writings are offered by Brian K. Wilcox, a United Methodist pastor serving in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. He writes in the spirit of John Wesley's focus on the priority of inner experience of the Triune God; scriptural holiness; ongoing sanctification; the goal of Christian perfection (or, wholeness). Brian seeks to integrate the best of the contemplative teachings of Christianity East and West, from the patristic Church to the present. Brian lives a vowed contemplative life with his two dogs, Bandit Ty and St. Francis, in North Florida. OneLife writings are for anyone seeking to live and share love, joy, and peace in the world and in devotion to God as she or he best understands God.
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