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I am convinced that the contemplative mystics are right, universally, in affirming to us that we each and together are One with God. I believe that when Jesus speaks, in St. John 10.30, “I and the Father are one” (ESV) that He, in His human incarnation, had realized prior union with the One. I find no warrant in Scripture to assume that this conviction of union was given to Jesus at no cost of discipline, practice, and choice. If so, then, we fall into an over-high Christology and, essentially, say, “Well, all that was for Jesus. I will just trust Him. He was one with the Father, but not I.”
Rather, Jesus is the Embodying of the Fact that we are all—yes, including, you—called to realize, alone and in community, union with the Infinite. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), seeing in Jesus a model for our experience of union, affirmed that every Christian is potentially a contemplative, for the fullness of contemplation is in us each. Indeed, for Aquinas, our “final and perfect” happiness can only arise from realized union with the First Cause, as he posits in his Summa Theologia.
Final and perfect happiness cannot consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence. … For perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God … in which alone man’s happiness consists, …
Contrast the proposed pursuit of union with God that Aquinas speaks of and his realization of eternal union (see below) with the paltry pleasures that we often seek after for bliss. Likewise, note that for Aquinas, the mind was important in this realization. Further, note the effort involved in this reaching the Essence. God is fully present, always; the appropriation of that Essential Presence is a lifetime Journey, and more, through which we learn to be present to the Presence.
On December 6, 1273, Aquinas sat alone, quietly, in a sanctuary. He had just completed a Feast day. There, alone, after a lifetime of listening to lectures, discussing dogma, writing many volumes of intellectual argumentation, and teaching his hundreds of students, he sat, alone and to receive the greatest revelation of his life. There, his youthful zest surrendered to age, he was given the immediate knowledge of his union with God, eternally. After he left that sanctuary, he is reported to have never written again, saying, “Compared with what has been revealed to me, all my writings are mere straw!”
Thus, while not claiming to be the Christ or to be equal, absolutely, to the whole of the Whole, or God, we can know we are one with God-by-generation and realize that as one with God-by-participation, saying with Christ and in Christ, "I and the Father are one.”
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Honoring Jesus as Christ does not mean that we are not offered the full realization that He speaks of, lives, and invites for us to enjoy. To deny the offer in the name of Christ is not to honor the invitation of Christ and entails using the Christ to receive less than He wills for us, as words arising from the Word. However, most Christianity is thoroughly dualistic and, thus, preaching and teaching a doctrine that discourages the experience of Aquinas, as well as what a myriad of faithful Christians over the centuries report having experienced as a gift of Grace.
I wonder how many faithful Christians have not trusted their unitive experiences or approprited them, fearing they are not of God or fearing letting the "orthodox dualist" know of these nondual gifts of Grace. And too many Christians have used the theological dogma regarding Christ to use Christ as an excuse to keep distance from the invitation of Christ, joining the denial propounded by dualistically minded leaders, professors, pastors, and others who adore Christ but do not enter the fullness of the blessing of communion-and-union and who, by example, discourage others from that experiential union in Christ.
Without my trying to know the Mind of God, I agree that we are created and are being created out of Being, for Being seeks the experience of reciprocity, of relationship, of otherness, and of love. Note in the St. John passage, which begins this writing, “that the love which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
Of course, all this talk of being “in” is the language of dualism, of locality; we, however, speak through these words of the Nonlocal, Nondual Being, wherein we can neither, absolutely, be in or out, but this being in must be actualized through choice and ongoing discipline. Being “in” is a being in “in experience,” in “communioning-moving-into-unioning.”
Now, we return to the law of undulation. Jesus, in that great chapter of St. John 17, never speaks of our feeling one with each other or with the Wonderful Presence. He does not say in St. John 10.30, “I feel at one with the Father” or “I think I am one with the Father.”
Jesus, likewise, speaks of our being in union, not only with the Father and Jesus, but also with others. We do not have to believe this or feel it to know it, or the being would be subject to the act and, thus, subordinate to the act. This subordination of union to thought and feeling, however, cannot be, for union is a prior principle, or universal law of underived Being, or what Aquinas calls “First Cause” and Meister Eckhart calls “Godhead” (i.e., God above all Creative Action). What an amazing blessing that such union is Grace-full, thus, not reliant on its own Truth for our agreement or appropriation!
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