The Mystical Marriage

Love Intimate with Love

Dec 12, 2013

Saying For Today: Love Itself is witness to Love Itself in Silence, and is only hinted at outside of Silence.

Arem, a vowed Contemplative of Greenbough House of Prayer, offers an interspiritual work focusing on cultivating the Heart of Compassion. He integrates wisdom from the major spiritual Paths. To contact Arem, see the email address at the conclusion of this presentation. May you always know you are blessed!

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 Grace is realization of Grace in you and you in Grace. Christian contemplatives speak of this union as mutual indwelling. They speak of this gift of Love as the mystical marriage.

We have a prior union with Grace by nature; now we become one with Grace by Grace. We realize the first union by creation with a second union of Awakening. This is the same as saying that the little girl looking in the well sees herself as the home of God. Yet, the mystical Grace to realize that is something arising through a oneing by Love that summons us Itself to Itself; yet, this is none other than the Love that hears Love. For our native Nature is Love. Love calls to Love, Love responds to Love.

Therefore, we have two vital aspects of the mystical vision. First, we are to journey toward the mystical marriage, whereby we realize by experience our already-always-union with the One. We hold in tension, then, a seeming paradox at the heart of nondual mysticism: we are all and already one with the Divine. Our coming to mutual indwelling is based on the attraction of the timeless union between the soul and God.

This mystical marriage is so intimate that the beloved of the Beloved participating in the Beloved finds a natural dropping of the vision of imitating the object of worship as an act of self-will. No self remains apart from Grace, or Grace dissolves the independence of self as a self-other-than to a self-arising-from-Presence. We no longer give priority to imitating Christ, for example, 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. This Christ, then, does not refer specifically to the "Christ" worshiped by any one religion.

In mutual indwelling, consequently, virtue is viewed in a substantive spirituality: morality is a manifestation of the Grace that one intimately shares in. A doing and not doing to please the Divine Itself, 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 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, an early Christian leader, 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)

We write here of this Mystery. To know It intimately cannot be written. Love Itself is witness to Love Itself in Silence, and is only hinted at outside of Silence.