We Share One Life, We Are One Life
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Holy men and women speak of a center within us all - the Center of everything. In this center we are told we meet God. We learn the center, or Grace, is everywhere and nowhere. Our human destiny and joy is to dive into that Mystery, to give ourselves to this Life.
Melvyn Matthews, in Making Room for God, writes of the 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 living within us each and in whom we live. God is the Thou in whom we are thous. "God" is a word for this Life, this Isness Is-ing, this Being Be-ing, this Love Loving us.
The result of this experiential union with the Light 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. . ..
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*Opening photograph, Fellowship Gardens, by Marc Yoo, Flickr.
