Lectio
“The wholeness one experiences within is the same wholeness that holds the universe together. The Whole of every whole is the ineffable love of God.”
— Ilia Delio, The Not-yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole
Meditatio
We contain within us the very stuff of the universe. We are not merely in or of the universe. We are the universe — though we have forgotten this, and must somehow remember what was never lost. It is only in our subjective perception that we are apart from, or other than, the Whole.
And yet, our perception divides us from that which contains us and is contained within us. Through our very thoughts and senses, we are free to act as if we, alone, are the center of the universe — separate from the universe itself.
When we turn our attention inward — whether drawn by love, driven by suffering, or both — we find something altogether different from the perception of subjective self and objective reality that normally governs our experience. In the deep silence of contemplation, we discover a unified reality wherein there is no subject, no object, and no division. In this deep silence, both I and other disappear, and only wholeness remains.
But this state of experiential wholeness is not easily attained. In fact, the harder we try to get there, the more it eludes us. We cannot think or act our way into experiential wholeness, even if it is our God-given natural state — the Eden from which we have estranged ourselves — perhaps inevitably, through the very freedom that makes our return to Love a gift graced from within rather than an imposition from without — by eating the fruit of the tree of duality (Genesis 3:6).
In fact, most of our thoughts and actions pull us further and further away from the Whole. Most of our thoughts and actions convince us that we are self-justified, self-important, and independent from the very ground of Being that makes our being possible — that forms and sustains us from moment to moment, breath by breath (Acts 17:28).
No, neither thought nor effort can lift the veil of separateness and reveal the truth of wholeness. Only grace can puncture the ever-present cloud of unknowing that shrouds us in illusion. The Holy Spirit alone can polish the darkened glass through which we see ourselves and the world — making transparent what was once opaque, allowing divinity to see divinity as divinity (1 Corinthians 13:12), even if only for a moment that leaves us as quickly and mysteriously as it arrives.
In these graced moments of clarity, we glimpse the wholeness within, and we see with sightless vision that this wholeness within connects us to the wholeness of all — that we are not simply one being among many, but one with everything that is, was, and ever will be. In these moments, no matter how few or fleeting they may be, we are gifted with some small fraction of the experience of oneness with the Whole of love that is heaven. And this taste leaves us thirsting for more, longing for more, and searching for more.
It leaves us helplessly in love with Love, restless and powerless over its pull, knowing that we can do nothing to earn or deserve that which we want more than anything — eternal union with the very wholeness from which we are not separate, but for the false self we have constructed around our belief that we are — a self that grace must slowly, mercifully dismantle, until there is nothing left but grace, nothing left but love, nothing left but the very Whole that is God (1 John 4:16).
Oratio
broken apart by perception,
by the ancient desire to be other —
to be one,
but not One —
with sightless vision, gifted,
I see that I am not I,
you are not you,
we are not we.
we are one —
not parts of a whole
but the whole itself,
in and of and as the same Love.
reunited by grace,
for love,
in love,
as love —
made whole,
now and forever,
made I Am
with I Am
by I Am.
amen
Contemplatio
Where in your life do you sense the false self loosening its grip — and what are you discovering beneath it?
Related Scripture
“In him we live and move and have our being.” — Acts 17:28 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Waiting for You Who Never Left: On Longing, Absence, and God’s Unceasing Love, which explores the same paradox from the other side — the ache of divine absence that is itself evidence of a union we have never truly left.
~Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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