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Wisdom Story
A little girl stood with her grandfather by an old-fashioned open well. They had just lowered a bucket and had drawn some water to drink.
"Grandfather," asked the little girl, "where does God live?"
The old man lifted up his little granddaughter and held her over the open well. "Look down into the well," he said, "and tell me what you see?"
"I see myself," replied the little girl.
The grandfather said, "That, my dear, is where God lives."
Wisdom Quote
As children, most of us learned early the biblical story about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The garden is the symbol of unitive consciousness where we cannot be separate from God. Whatever our journeys outward from there, they eventually lead us back to the center to find who we really are, to find ourselves in God.
*Richard Rohr. God in Our Midst.
Comments
Realization, inwardly, of union with God is realization of God in you and you in God. Christian contemplatives speak of this union as mutual indwelling. They speak of this gift of grace as the mystical marriage. Here, Christ weds the soul to Himself in oneness.
We have a prior union with God by nature; now we become one with God by grace. We realize the first union by creation with a second union of mystical grace. This is the same as saying that the little girl looking in the well sees herself as the divine home of God. Yet, the mystical grace to realize that is something that arises through a oneing by the Inner Christ, the Spirit of the Word.
St. John of the Cross speaks of the mutual indwelling. He writes in Ascent of Mount Carmel...
The soul then by resigning itself ... becomes immediately enlightened by, and transformed in, God; because He communicates His own supernatural Being in such a way that the soul seems to be God Himself and to possess the things of God. Such a union is then wrought when God bestows on the soul that supreme grace which makes the things of God and the soul one by the transformation which renders the one the partaker of the other. The soul seems to be God rather than itself, and indeed is God by participation, though in reality preserving its own natural substance as distinct from God as it did before, although transformed in Him, as the window preserves its own substance distinct from that of the rays of the sun shining through it and making it light.
This evidences in spiration, or sharing in the breath of the Divine within the Holy Trinity. St. John of the Cross, in The Spiritual Canticle, writes of this result of mutual indwelling with God...
For granting that God has bestowed upon it so great a favour as to unite it to the most Holy Trinity, whereby it becomes like unto God, and God by participation, is it altogether incredible that it should exercise the faculties of its intellect, perform its acts of knowledge and of love, or, to speak more accurately, should have it all done in the Holy Trinity together with It, as the Holy Trinity Itself?
Therefore, we have two vital aspects of the Christian mystical vision. First, we are to journey toward the mystical marriage, whereby we realize by experience our already-always-union with the Creating One. We hold in tension, then, a seeming paradox at the heart of nondual Christian mysticism: we are all and already one with the Divine. Our coming to mutual indwelling is based on the attraction of the primordial union between the soul and God.
Second, mystical marriage results in intimacy with God that the Christian has not known before. Now, one is so resigned by love to Christ that the will of God spontaneously operates through the will of the soul and into the world.
Likely, in this life no perfection of this union is enjoyed by anyone. At least for most, this mystical marriage is one more stage toward wholeness. God being Infinity, we can logically assume oneness with God is not a static union. Rather, we can conjecture that mutual indwelling has many, possibly boundless, evolvements in the infinite potential of Infinity.
Still, practically, this mystical marriage is so intimate that the Christian participating in God finds a natural dropping of the vision of imitating Christ as an act of self-will. Rather, we no longer give priority to imitating Christ, for imitation is a goal of separate-will. We move in mystical marriage to a being as Christ is by consciously, spontaneously being in Christ and Christ being in us.
Therefore, in mutual indwelling Christian virtue is viewed in a substantive spirituality: morality is a manifestation of the life of Christ that one intimately shares in. A doing and not doing to please God, which is an obedience based on a theology of separation, is taken into a more mature view of being pleasing to God, for God is doing in and, then, through the soul, while the soul is doing in and, then, through God. The union of love itself is the source of the virtue, not God or the soul either in separation. This substantive spirituality does not replace fully the earlier form of obedience; rather, the latter encompasses the former in the more mature substantive union.
St. Paul offers us the challenge of the mystical marriage. In witnessing to his own inner experience, he writes...
I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
*Galatians 2.20 (NKJV)
Here, the union with God-in-Christ integrates, as is central in the thought and life of St. Paul, the historical incarnation of the eternal, "preexistent" Logos, or Word, with the resurrected Christ now diffused within all creation and particularly so in the soul of the person in union with the Word.
St. Paul refers to this Christ indwelling us in the letter to the Colossians. He grounds our Christian hope not simply in a relationship with Jesus Christ but in the resurrected One living within the consciousness of each one of us in a mystical fusion of our two beings...
This message was kept secret for centuries and generations past, but now it has been revealed to God’s people. For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you Gentiles, too. And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory.
*Colossians 1.26-27 (NLT)
What is the assurance St. Paul gives to the Colossian Christians of their sharing the glory of Christ? He gives as assurance not their faith in Christ; rather, the assurance he offers is nothing other than Christ lives in you. For Christ, for St. Paul, for the great Christian saints and mystics, mystical marriage is the gift offered to us that Christ might offer Himself to others through us in a more mature form of substantive likeness and sharing, one that surpasses all witnessing for Christ through the levels in which we retain a separative sense of God.
Reflection
Have you ever sensed a union with Christ? What was that like?
In your own words, define the paradox of our being and becoming one with God?
Why do you think most Christian teaching ignores the teaching of union with God?
Brian will respond to requests pertaining to seeking a Spiritual Mentor. He offers retreats, workshops, and classes in such subjects as Contemplative Prayer (he trains in Visualized Praying, Centering Prayer, Christian Meditation, The Jesus Prayer, ...), Contemplative Living, A Spiritual Understanding of the Lord's Prayer, and Spiritual Use of the Scripture. See any major on-line bookseller for his book An Ache for Union.
For bibliographical data, submission of replies, and biographical information, see next page:
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