God is far closer than I had imagined…

Your True Self is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16.26). Your essence, your exact “thisness,” will never appear again in another incarnation. . . .

You (and every other created thing) begin with a divine DNA, an inner destiny as it were, an absolute core that knows the truth about you, a blueprint tucked away in the cellar of your being, an imago Dei that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself. As it says in Romans (5.5), “It is the Holy Spirit poured into your heart, and it has been given to you.” . . .

John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), the Franciscan philosopher . . .called each soul a unique “thisness” (haecceity), and he said it was to be found in every act of creation in its singularity. For him, God did not create universals, genus, and species, or anything that needed to come back again and again to get it right (reincarnation), but only specific and unique incarnations of the Eternal Mystery—each one chosen, loved, and preserved in existence as itself—by being itself. And this is the glory of God!

Richard Rohr, excerpted from Immortal Diamond: the Search for Our True Self (due for publication February 2013)

The Holy Spirit is the un-thought-of member of the Trinity. He is truly God, yet he is in each of us, the thread that binds us, the light in our eyes—in the eyes of every creature (Psalm 104.27-30).

We cannot touch or see the Holy Spirit, as we cannot touch or see the thisness of ourselves. There are no tests for the presence of the Spirit. Sometimes when we are least aware of it, the Spirit is working most strongly in us.

God is all, and in all. When we know this, when we have seen it for ourselves, we are changed (Galatians 5.22,23) and sometimes hardly recognise ourselves, almost as Mary Magdalene failed to recognise her risen Lord in the dawn garden, till he spoke her name (John 20.16).

I have found these recent days most strange, and the patterned light shifts across the things that are, like leaf-dapples in a summer forest. God is far closer than I had imagined.

The Feast of Mary Magdalene

...Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping?" She said to them, "They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him." When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?" Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." Jesus said to her, "Mary!" She turned and said to him in Hebrew, "Rabbouni!" (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, "Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, "I have seen the Lord"; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

John 20.11-18

Mary, love and faith have brought you here again to us today, remembering you as Apostle to the Apostles, she whom her Lord trusted to bear the Gospel to the disciples in hiding, and through them, to the world, to the long centuries: to us, here, today, again.

Blessed is she who believed, and herself, trusted: and went out from the garden...

Being where Christ is…

All truly contemplative souls have this in common: not that they gather exclusively in the desert, or that they shut themselves up in reclusion, but that where He is, there they are.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, p.95

And that does not make today a comfortable place to be, or even one that the mind can grasp, really. There is just this hollow silence, an absence of anything that thought can reach, or hold.

Prayer today is odd—a reaching out into what is not known, but still loved; almost as the Magdalene loved between the Cross and the empty tomb, perhaps. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing said it well, many years ago: “He can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought…” (Ch. 6)

Multitudes of obligations?

Much of our acceptance of multitudes of obligations is due to our inability to say No. We calculated that the task had to be done, and we saw no one ready to undertake it. We calculated the need, and then calculated our time, and decided maybe we could squeeze it in somewhere. But the decision was a heady decision, not made within the sanctuary of the soul.

A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R Kelly, with thanks to inward/outward

So much of our Christian life, not to mention elsewhere, is taken up with this “acceptance of multitudes of obligations” that we assume that this is the natural, right and inevitable way to be a Christian. Well, I all too often find myself making that assumption, anyway. It is so hard to turn around, and allow God to look at the whole thing from within us. But it was Jesus himself who said, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Dear Mary of Bethany, I think she must have been a particular favourite of Jesus’. Her devotion, her single-mindedness, her willingness to step right outside her culture, her final and absolute faithfulness—it isn’t hard to see why she would have a particular place among his followers. Whether or not you accept the Catholic identification of her with Mary Magdalene, Mary is the woman of tears (John 11.33), the one who saw, where her brothers had so clearly failed to see, the Cross standing directly across the path of her Lord (John 12.1-8), and anointed him for that journey, and as Matthew and Mark (26.13; 14.9) record, he recognised her for it. “Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

Truly, there is need of only one thing. Mary got it right where her sister, and most of us, fail. No wonder we pray, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…”

For the Feast of Mary Magdalene

The warrior archetype is not going away. Our job is to educate and redefine the warrior in the way that Moses, David, Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Dorothy Day lived out their passion. Warrior energy is not in its essence wrong. It takes warrior energy to see through and stand against mass illusions of our time, and be willing to pay the price of disobedience. It takes warrior energy to see through the soft rhetoric of “support our troops” which cleverly diverts us from the objective evil of war. It takes warrior energy to march to a different drum, disbelieve the patriotic trivia, and re-believe in the tradition of non-violence, civil resistance, and martyrdom.

Young men and women who take oaths of secular governments are not martyrs in any classic sense; rather they are soldiers offering to kill for Caesar. We Christians are taught a very different way: the way of the cross.

Richard Rohr, ‘For the Victory of Love’, Praying, No. 43, July-August 1991, pp. 11-12, with thanks to John Mark Ministries