I have been crucified;
yet, I live,
no longer I,
but Christ lives in me. …
I live by faith in the Son of God
who has loved me and given himself
for me.
– Galatians 2: 19-20
“The Transforming Union can evolve into an even greater unity or experience of oneness with the Ultimate Reality which has now become the Ultimate Presence. And in no way can a concept come anywhere near describing that experience, the experience of unity. Well, if that is attained, then the awareness that God is coming to us and is present at every level of our being and has always been there and can come to us through any experiences of the senses, the imagination, the memory, the intellect. …. In other words, the whole of the natural organism is suffused with this light, life and love in such a way that it begins to resonate throughout our internal senses and even our bodies with the sensitivity to the Divine Reality presenting itself in an infinite number of ways … open to the x-ray eyes of faith and welcoming us into the world of freedom, which is not freedom to do what we want, but freedom to do what God wants without thinking about it. …
“At this further level of unity, one perceives God in all creation. And that means that at the same time that you perceive any reality … in God and you perceive God first, you might say, so that the divine transcendence and immanence becomes a kind of transfigured life although it expresses itself without any fanfare, without any unusual experiences that people could see or perceive.”
– Thomas Keating, excerpts from Session 39 video
A Meditation
“The immensity of God is the essential attribute which allows us to see [God] everywhere, within us and around us. … whose marrow is everywhere present and constitutes the true food of our lives. What is, when all is said and done, the concrete link which binds all these universal entities together and confers on them a final power of gaining hold of us? The essence of Christianity consists in asking oneself that question, and in answering: ‘The Word incarnate, our Lord Jesus Christ.’ How can we validate to ourselves this prodigious identification of the Son of Man and the divine milieu? A first step, unquestionably, is to see the divine omnipresence in which we find ourselves plunged as
an omnipresence of action. God enfolds us and penetrates us by creating and preserving us.
“Now let us go a little further. Under what form, and with what end in view, has the Creator given us, and still preserves in us, the gift of participated being? Under the form of an essential aspiration toward him – and with a view to the unhoped-for cleaving which is to make us one and the same complex thing with him. The action by which God maintains us in the field of [God’s] presence is a unitive transformation. … in which the substantial one and the created many fuse without confusion in a
whole. …
“As a consequence of the Incarnation, the divine immensity has transformed itself for us into the
omnipresence of christification. … Everything I endure, with faith and love, by way of diminishment or
death, makes me a little more closely an integral part of this mystical body.”
– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu
To Practice
- View the video excerpt “Into Unity Consciousness,” God is Love: The Heart of All Creation. It is about 10 minutes in length.
- Reflect that Fr. Thomas exclaims that the awakening of the eye of faith is to begin to see the Divine Presence in everything, in the smallest particle that we know of and beyond. This is heaven on earth! How might you practice this seeing, hearing, sensing, and tasting the Divine Presence as you move through ordinary life?
