Lectio
“We start to realize that the deeper we go into this depth, that the depth opens out upon, or bottoms out upon, a bottomless abyss of presence that’s welling up and giving itself away as the moment we’re experiencing.”
— James Finley, Mystical Depths of Non-Dual Consciousness (Part 3)
Meditatio
There is a strange kind of loneliness, or aloneness, that accompanies the long journey of spiritual awakening. No matter how far we feel ourselves falling into the depths of God’s loving, eternal presence, our body is still our body, the world is still the world, and the ways in which our finite bodies relate to the finiteness of the world are still constrained by the finitude of both. And so, in spite of the limitless nature of the eternity that is God, into which we feel ourselves being drawn, the people around us do not see what we see, they do not feel what we feel, and they have no way of relating to the awakening we are experiencing except through their own experience of awakening which they may or may not be having. In this way, we are never truly alone because we are all in some form of relationship with God — either sleeping in His presence like the disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane or awakening to His presence like the disciples whose hearts burned and whose eyes were opened by the breaking of the bread on the road to Emmaus — but each of us is also, somehow, entirely alone in the way in which we, ourselves, are experiencing God in and as this very moment — which is God giving Godself to and through us in and as this very moment.
And yet this is the very way Love has always worked — from the prophets who were broken open in the wilderness and the temple and the pit, to the disciples who were met by Jesus in the unrepeatable singularity of who each of them was — finding us where no one else lives, leading us where none can follow, speaking to us in a language only we can hear.
Jesus does not relate to Peter the way He relates to John — the rock who must be broken before he can be remade, and the beloved who leans against His chest at supper. He does not call Matthew the way He calls Nathanael — one pulled from a tax collector’s table, the other found sitting under a fig tree and seen, somehow, before they had ever met. Mary Magdalene, who stands weeping at the tomb when the others have gone, hears her name spoken in a way that no one else in history has ever heard it spoken — and in that single word, Mary, the risen Christ addresses the whole of who she is. Thomas, who will not believe without touching the wounds, is not rebuked for his doubt but invited deeper into it — put your hand here — as though the wound itself were the door. And Jesus met Paul in Paul’s very persecution of Jesus, stopping him in his tracks, blinding him with love and conviction: Why are you persecuting me?
Christ does not meet us where we would prefer, for if He did, we may, in fact, never meet Him at all. He meets us where we are — exactly as we are and how we would prefer not to be seen — naked and ashamed, each of us covering our true selves with fig leaves of our own creation. And in this meeting of us where and as we are, He meets us in a way that He meets no one else. He invites us into communion with God in a way that no one else has ever been in communion with God because our relationship with Him is utterly unique — utterly our own. And yet in each encounter with Christ, the same Love is giving itself away — finding the particular shape of each person, each wound, each longing, each act of resistance, rebellion, or rejection — and entering there.
While Christ may approach each of us in the solitude of who we are, He does not call us into aloneness. The same Love that meets each of us in the unrepeatable particularity of who we are also calls us into one another — into His Body, which is His Bride, the Church, and into the Communion of Saints that spans every age from the first whisper of the Word — Let there be light — until its final Amen. And through this community of Christians, we do not carry our aloneness in isolation. We carry it together, each one known by God in a way no one else can fully see, and yet gathered — like loaves and fishes — into something none of us could be alone.
Even in our solitude in Christ, we are not without companions on this path. The Lord sends us teachers — some living, some long gone — who have been drawn into this same depth and returned with words for it, or who transitioned into Glory but left the words behind them like a candle illuminating a dark cave for all who might enter. And every teacher is, in fact, the same teacher, because each one is a particular manifestation of the one Teacher whose sole teaching is Love. Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, Julian of Norwich, James Finley — they do not each teach something different. They each, in their unrepeatable singularity, teach us the same thing. And that one thing is what is being taught to us, now, in this moment, in the particular way only we can receive it.
And perhaps this is the deepest comfort the Christian tradition offers: the aloneness does not resolve. It deepens. The prophets knew this — Jeremiah in the pit, Elijah under the broom tree, Isaiah undone in the temple, each of them carrying something they could not fully share, each of them met by God in the precise location of their breaking. And the disciples who were met so singularly by Jesus in life were met just as singularly in death — Peter on his cross, Paul beneath the sword, Mary Magdalene carrying what she had seen to the end of her days, John outliving everyone, left alone with what he knew.
None of them lived or died surrounded by people who fully understood what was happening or why. They lived and died the way mystics live and die — falling further into the same presence they had been falling into all along. And what they discovered — what we are invited to trust — is that the depth keeps opening. The abyss does not bottom out. It invites. It expands. It receives. The solitude of the prophet, the solitude of the apostle, the solitude of the mystic, and the solitude of this moment are all the same solitude. And the same Love is welling up and pouring out through all of it — giving itself away as this moment, and the next, and the last — giving itself away as the mystery of our communal aloneness in Christ.
Oratio
Love Of All Love
take me Lord
into your arms
the openness
of all openness
the love
of all love
wed me to your body
my head laid on your chest
everything I am without you
is worth nothing at all
the nothing I become in you
is worth everything
eternally
the treasure
of all treasures
the love
of all love
Contemplatio
If the abyss does not bottom out but invites, expands, and receives — what would it mean to stop resisting the depth and simply fall into Love?
Related Scripture
“I have called you by name, you are mine.” — Isaiah 43:1 (NRSVCE)
For Further Reading
For Further Reading: If you enjoyed this post, you may also like The Collage of Heaven: How God Speaks Through Every Unique Life, which traces how God leads each person along an unrepeatable path — and how the singular shape of every life becomes, together, a masterpiece no single human artist could have made alone.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity.
Wrestling With God.
Returning To Love.
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