A young African convert visited a school and watched some girls sewing. He noticed that the thread always followed the needle, and he saw in that a weighty spiritual truth. Later that evening, he prayed, “O Lord, You are the needle, and I am the thread!”
* * *
Colossians 3.3, in the Christian Scriptures, has, “For you died to this life [bios], and your real life [zoe] is hidden with Christ in God" (NLT). This does not mean that you lose the essential life of body and mind - the biological. You do not become brain and body dead. Rather, you die to the control of bios as the determination of your inner and outer orientation bios is no longer acting as the Center, Grace, or Love, is. This demise is a reorientation of the very faculties of body and mind that estranged you from zoe, what could be called "spiritual life."
This repositioning in Christ - certainly analogous to other image systems in other faiths - is an actual event, not a mere metaphor, and it entails having the whole self taken into the Spirit of Grace by the Spirit Herself. By means of this new position together in Christ, or Love, we each are taken into Grace ~ as St. Paul has it: “hidden with Christ in God.” The same reading can be “hidden in Christ in God.”
Therefore, I am actually in Christ, really in God. Certainly, this is a mystical teaching, as many of the New Testament teachings are, but mystical only means most purely actual. To say being in Christ cannot be understood does not limit the reality of its truth. Indeed, the truths mystical are those most descriptive of our hiddenness in Grace within Grace, and the same applies in other religions. The more mystical is a teaching, the farther from body and mind, and the closer to Pure Spirit, Who is Truth.
We can experience this being in Christ, in God, in many ways. One way is engagement with the world. As the Spirit of Christ progressively influences our whole self, we begin to experience the Divine in the natural order more, and this includes experience of Beautiful Holiness in the other. We see and feel, then, Grace everywhere, shining from the Sun of Life, freely giving Itself to everyone, for all to feel and rejoice in as One.
*Reborn, Gustavo Ciancio, Flickr
*Lotus of the Heart is a Work of Arem Nahariim-Samadhi ~ someone in love with Life and inviting others to that same ecstasy of Love ~ and, by the way, herein is nothing he claims as his own.
