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The Church Father Athanasius, wrote The Life of St. Anthony, a fourth-century writing on the life of St. Anthony. St. Anthony was from Egypt and the “father" of Christian monasticism. Athanasius writes:
He observed the graciousness of one, the earnestness in prayer of another; he studied the even temper of one and the kindheartedness of another. He fixed his attention on the vigils kept by one and on the studies pursued by another. He admired one for his patient endurance, another for his fasting and sleeping on the ground. He watched closely one man’s meekness and the forbearance by another. And in one and all alike he marked especially their devotion to Christ and the love that they had for one another.
Thomas Keating writes, commenting on the witness of Athanasius to St. Anthony’s disposition, writes,
Notice the bond that unties the members of the group amid their diversity of gifts: the love of Christ and their love for one another. The deeper the unity, the more pluralism a community can absorb. The variety of viewpoints and gifts are experienced not as threats to one’s practice and views, but as enrichments. (Invitation to Love)
Thomas Merton takes the words of Athanasius and Keating to another step of Embrace and shows how unity vision is possible:
If I can unite in myself the thought and devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and Latin Fathers, the Russians and the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From the secret and unspoken unity in me can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians. If we want to bring together what is divided, we can not do so by imposing one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other. But if we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political, and doomed to further conflict. We must contain all divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ. (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander)
With unity, as all things, there is a practical, empirical aspect. We do not automatically “see” others the way Athanasius depicts St. Anthony “seeing” others. Community does not automatically absorb pluralism in a healthy communion of diversity, as pointed to by Keating. We do not trascend in Christ by mere intent.
Merton clarifies that the historical diversity of the Church can only be unified through a unification of the same in each Christian. We “can prepare in” ourselves “the reunion of divided Christians.” The manifestation of outer unity must arise from “the secret and unspoken unity” within us, otherwise, there will be no unity and, thus, no Christian communion.
Merton, in his typical prophetic manner, takes us beyond where most Christians take us. He is not content with “Christian” unity, though that is vital to him. For Merton, Christian unity is only part of a greater unity made possible by Christ. We are called to “contain all divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ.” For Merton, Christ is not calling us only to Christian unity; Christ is calling us to unity, period.
The more we grow into the Christ Who Transcends Christianity, indeed, all religious faith, the more we, as Christians and persons of other faiths, include our faiths in an all-embracing unity and experience the Living Fact of all existence. Indeed, we experience the Christ as Existence Itself, the One Who unites, as the Word, all persons back into the Source, the Father, through the Spirit, the Energy of Grace.
Living in a global village does not mean the abandonment of the historical and cultural particulars of faiths. The Christian does not become non-Christian anymore than the Buddhist becomes non-Buddhist. Rather, Christ becomes the Word in Whom particulars find their unifying truth in Love.
This will require for persons of all faiths to allow to be lived in themselves, through a radical surrender to Grace, the life of the Spirit of Life. This is the Christ, even though this Reality might be called by different names and titles. Now, we are to be surrendered to a Vision which will allow us to see all seekers of God as our brothers and sisters in Christ, and we must find means to allow the unity within our particular paths to join us in the one Path.
As Christians, our being the Body of Christ opens to a meaning from particular to universal, as truths open to Truth, and images of God open to God. This unifying transcendence, or transcending unity, must be worked out through radical surrender in each of us, even surrendering our claims to be the only true spiritual community, the only means that God is seeking to heal Creation and restore all to the Image of God.
Spiritual Exercise
1. How have you become more open to the varied ways God is working in and among persons of other Christian communions? Other faith traditions?
2. Can you remain open to how Christ might mean more than what you have before believed Christ to be? Explain.
3. What is “unifying transcendence, or transcending unity”?
4. What does Keating mean when he writes, “The deeper the unity, the more pluralism a community can absorb”?
5. What is the relationship between “unity” and “inclusiveness”?
6. Why do some religious persons, over time, become more inclusive and other persons do not?
Prayer
Transform my heart that my eyes might see in the most hurt and most harmful a child of God. Amen.
Brian's book of mystical love poetry, An Ache for Union, can be ordered through major bookdealers.
Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors
The People of the
United Methodist Church
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