Lectio
“When God creates us as the beloved, God creates us with the promise of making infinite union with the infinite mystery of God to be the very dowry of our being. It’s our God-given, godly destiny that’s given to us in our eternal nothingness without God.”
— James Finley, Turning to the Mystics: Mechthild of Magdeburg: Listener Questions (Part 1)
Meditatio
God created us with the capacity for God. But because God never imposes Godself on us, we were also created with the capacity for not-God. God gave us Godself, but God also gave us freedom.
We are free to consent or dissent. We are free to choose communion with love or alienation from it. We are free to pursue treasure in our isolated self or treasure in our true nature. And we are free to choose eternity with God or eternity without God.
But these choices are not equal. The former are the choices to accept a gift already given. The latter are choices to reject that gift. To choose God is to receive God. To choose other than God is to seek from what is not God what only God can give — and to find, in the end, only want. The outer darkness (Matthew 8:12). The worm that does not die (Mark 9:48). The fire unquenched (Mark 9:43). Jesus names these not as threats but as descriptions — the interior landscape of a life that has turned, at every choosing, away from the only love that satisfies.
But how exactly do we consent? How do we receive and accept this gift already given? The fact that we have these questions is proof that God has already given us the answer. The questions themselves are the answer — the Holy Spirit already doing its good work within us, already drawing us toward the gift we were made to receive. The longing itself is God’s response.
Some hear this longing as a call. Elijah on the mountain, in the sound of sheer silence (1 Kings 19:12). Mary at the feet of Jesus, who chose, as Jesus said, “the better part” (Luke 10:42). The author of The Cloud of Unknowing writes that the first three stages of the Christian life can be begun and completed in this earthly life — and that grace will help us start the fourth, the perfect stage, here also, though it will last forever in the heavenly joy of eternity. This is not only for mystics and monastics. It is for anyone who longs.
James Finley speaks of fidelity to the daily rendezvous with God — of making time to show up to receive the gift already given — and of how we cannot make the moments of oneness happen, but we can freely choose to assume the stance that offers the least resistance to be overtaken by what we cannot make happen. That rendezvous takes many forms. It may be a period of centering prayer in the early morning. It may be the slow reading of a sacred text. It may even be the writing of these words, or the reading of them.
God says to us, in Psalm 46, simply: Be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10). And in that stillness, the gift of God’s very self begins to unfold within us as God always intended.
Oratio
Here am I Lord
as yesterday
and the day before
by your grace
I shall be here again
tomorrow
sitting at your feet
listening to your word
receiving your gift
may I not break faith
may I not turn away
may I remain still
in you
with you
for you
Contemplatio
What does your daily rendezvous with God look like, and what gifts have you found there waiting for you?
Related Scripture
“As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.” — Psalm 42:1 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
If you enjoyed this post, you may also like Cherished Emptiness: Creating a Sabbath in Your Heart With Macrina Wiederkehr, which explores how our God-shaped capacity for the divine is met by a stillness that creates space for God to work — a natural companion to this post’s meditation on receiving the gift already given.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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