Singleness of heart…

Mysticism begins when the totally transcendent image of God starts to recede; and there’s also a deepening sense of God as imminent, present, here, now, within me. Augustine’s line was “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself” or “more me than I am myself.” St. Catherine of Genoa shouted it in the streets, “My deepest me is God!” In other words, the One Beyond is also one with me…

You must overcome your primary alienation to know truthfully—and what you learn is that the Beyond One is doing the knowing through you! You are not alone. The gap has been overcome from the other side. God is no longer “out there.” At this point, it’s not like one has a new relationship with God; it’s like one has a whole new God! “God himself is my counsellor, and at night my innermost being instructs me,” says the Psalmist (Ps. 16.7).

After the beginnings of mystical experience, one finds that what makes something secular or profane is precisely to live on the surface of anything. It’s not that the sacred is over here and the profane is over there. Everything is profane if you live on the surface of it, and everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it—even your sin. Jesus lived and loved the depths of things, as all mystics do.

So the division for the mystic is not between the secular and the sacred, but between the superficial and the profound. Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit, who was an expert at Vatican II, loved to call this “the mysticism of ordinary life.”

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

We must be careful how we read this. Rohr is writing very much from inside the experience he is describing, and statements like, “everything is sacred if you go into the depths of it—even your sin” are easily misunderstood. Rohr is not saying that sin is in itself holy; merely that our own sin, if we are truly open to the grace God gives to us through the Cross, is the sacred ground from which our holiness grows, like wheat from the muck that is spread on the land. But the muck of sin must be well ploughed in for it to nourish the grain that falls into the earth and dies (John 12.24).

Jesus himself said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God…” Matthew 5.7-8) That purity is singleness of heart, that longing for mercy Paul wrote of in Romans 8.18-24.

Once again, it is the Jesus Prayer that pulls all this together, makes (to the heart, at least) sense of its contradictory truth:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

Fasting of the heart…

Fasting of the heart means hearing, but not with the ear... The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitation and from preoccupations. Fasting of the heart begets unity and freedom... If you can do this, you will be able to go among men in their world without upsetting them. You will not enter into conflict with their ideal image of themselves...

Look at this window. It is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light. Being full of light, it becomes an influence, by which others are secretly transformed.

The Way of Chuang Tzu Thomas Merton, with thanks to Diane Walker

Fasting of the heart… I have hesitated to post here, because I haven’t had the words for what has been happening within by own heart. Perhaps a kind of fasting is the best way to describe it. So much that we mistake for certainty is in fact preconception, and we cling to our preconceptions as to lifebelts in the great wash of God’s presence.

We do not realise the vastness of God – at least, I don’t – the sheer appalling otherness of this istigkeit we presume to worship.

Aslan is no tame lion, as CS Lewis reminded us. Our Lord’s incarnation is often said to dissolve the distances between God and man, but what kind of a man was it his disciples, the women and men who walked and ate and drank with him day in and day out, actually knew? He terrified them on occasion (Matthew 14:22-33), struck them witless with awe (Luke 9:23-33), baffled them (John 6.43-68), and, after his resurrection, was at times simply unrecognisable (Luke 24.15-16; John 20.14-15).

“…what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” as the Psalmist (8.4) says. A presence so great that he encompasses the galaxies, the vast interstellar chasms, and yet knows and cares for the fall of a sparrow… What can we know of such a presence, except what we are shown by him?

Tiny and broken, what can we cry but, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner?