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Wisdom Quote
Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness.
*Mother Teresa
I would have you ... to believe that the reasons why you or any others are for a long time vainly endeavouring after and hardly ever attaining these first-rate virtues is because you seek them in the way they are not to be found, in a multiplicity of human rules, methods, and contrivances, and not in the simplicity of faith in which those who applied to Christ immediately obtained that which they asked of Him.
*William Law
Comments
Contemplation leads to the Center ~ to Christ, the Word. This Christ is God, Beloved, Friend, All-in-All, Wisdom of God.... Therefore, the faith of the contemplative is a faith of dark, loving knowledge. The contemplative passes through knowing with mind and knowing with heart, to only knowing.
Christ becomes so at one In-Love with us, and we with Him, that we move beyond all means of knowing Him: knowing Him implies a someone or something other to receive. In pure union there is no receiver for knowing, only the act of pure knowing.
The union is a oneness of knowing, wherein the act of loving is the act of knowing, and the knowing of Christ and the knowing of the contemplative is one knowing. In contemplation, purely, there is no sense of Christ, for there remains no sense of a self to know Christ. One abides in the purest form of the simplicity of faith.
Of course, this does not last, but for a little we enjoy a love that is simply Being~in~Love, Loving Knowing, or Knowing Love. Here we are so in Christ, in the within Christ is in us, that a sense of Christ as other and a sense of self as other to Him is transmuted into a higher order act of conjugal unioning, wherein we participate in the inner life of the Trinity.
Spiritual Exercise
What is meant by a conjugal unioning with Christ?
Have you had moments of pure contemplation? If so, what was that like for you?
*The Mother Teresa quote is from http://www.ewtn.com/motherteresa/words.htm ; the quote from William Law is in "The Spirit of Love," in William Law and Stephen Hobhouse. Selected Mystical Writings of William Law.
See any major on-line bookseller for his book An Ache for Union.
For replies and biographical information, and submission to "The Light Shines" daily devotionals ~ a ministry of Christ Community United Methodist Church, Punta Gorda, FL, see next page:
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