An excerpt from John Main OSB, “The Present Christ” (April 1981), in MONASTERY WITHOUT WALLS: The Spiritual Letters of John Main, ed. L. Freeman (Norwich: Canterbury, 2006), p. 163.
In the Resurrection we are absolved from the need to objectify God. No longer do we have to talk to God, to appease or petition him. “Your Father knows what your needs are before you ask him,” Jesus assures us.
From that eternal moment in time when Jesus awoke to his union with the Father humanity passed beyond the stage of its spiritual infancy. In that moment it matured into the “full stature of Christ.” This moment of Christ is found in the center of our being, in our own heart, where his spirit lives and grows like a seed buried in the ground. Finding that moment is the work of meditation. It is a joyful and vitalizing work because we move into the heart in a faith that knows that the moment has already dawned and is born imperishably. Once we know this union in our own experience our whole existence is reborn. It is known to be united in a wholeness that is holiness. And this is all the work of a moment, the moment of Christ.
We are not only freed from the need to see ourselves and God dualistically. We are actually summoned not to. “The time has come, indeed it is already here” when we are called to worship God in spirit and in truth. By saying this to the Samaritan woman Jesus calls us all into a new dimension of spiritual consciousness. We can no longer persist in the dualism of spiritual infancy and be in the truth of the moment of Christ. The indwelling of the Spirit of Christ is not just a gift, a special offer, a grace we can accept or decline. It is a reality, the door into the sheepfold of boundless union. It is the force in our destiny that brings us to completion. The wonder is that this summons is made by love and that it educates us with infinite gentleness.
After meditation: an excerpt from “The Guest is Inside You,” KABIR: Ecstatic Poems, versions by Robert Bly (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), p. 61.
I have been thinking of the difference
between water
and the waves on it. Rising,
water’s still water, falling back,
it is water, will you give me a hint
how to tell them apart?
Because someone has made up the word
“wave,” do I have to distinguish it
from water?
There is a Secret One inside us;
the planets in all the galaxies
pass through his hands like beads.
That is a string of beads one should look at with
luminous eyes.
Carla Cooper - cmcooper@gvtc.com