A Song For Today (Dr.) Kerrie Hide
The song I sing for you and for myself harmonizes with the voices of Christians from earliest foundations:
I pray, that out of God’s infinite glory, God may give you the power through the Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith and then planted in love and built on love you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the height and the depth the length and the breadth until knowing the love of Christ which is beyond all knowledge you are filled with the utter fullness of God. Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation in the Church and in Jesus Christ forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:14-20)
This song gives us clues as to how we may find the Song of songs and hear the voice of the beloved calling us to be one with the divine, wooing us to be filled with the utter fullness of God. In the last reflection we lit our lamps and journeyed with Teresa to the centre of the interior castle, the dwelling place of Christ who draws us to the centre into the life of the Trinity. In this reflection, I wish to explore how we can fulfil the desire expressed in this prayer to the Ephesians for our hidden selves to grow strong. I will continue to focus on the room of our heart, the centre of our being, the place where the human and the divine are one. We will see how the Song of songs is a great song of oneing, a song that unites and makes all things one. In this song, each of us sings our own, harmonizing with others, so that the whole composes a living, breathing melody. In harmonious rhythm we circle to the centre where our heart is one with the divine, and expand out from the centre to embrace all creation. Let us begin our melody by focusing on a key phrase in the song: planted in love and built on love.
Planted in Love and Built on Love
We are a people who are grounded in God’s infinite glory. Our centre is in God. Our hearts are the dwelling place of Christ. Planted in love and built on love our heritage is to be love with Love. Hadewijch’s poem captures the real intimacy of this bond:
In all seasons new and old,
If one is submissive to Love,
In the hot summer, the cold winter
S(he) will receive love from Love.
S(he) shall satisfy with full service
In encountering high Love;
So s(he) speedily becomes love with Love;
That is bound to happen.1
The poem tells of the most unifying belief expressed in Christian understanding: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us.” (1 Jn 4:16 b-17). Throughout human history mystics and prophetic voices from the tradition have called us to claim and to rejuvenate our awareness that we are grounded in a
Trinitarian love, as love, beloved and lover. They have called us to recognize that our God is present to us in being and doing as love calling us to make a home in God as God makes a home in us. (John 15). We have and continue to receive, love from Love. We exist in relationship with a personal God whose way of being present, being with and being for, is Love.
Mechthild describes the absolute fecundity of divine loving: When God could no longer contain God’s self, God created the soul and in immense love, gave God’s self to her as God’s
own2. God freely chose not to remain self-contained, but to give God’s self to us because we are God’s own. Consequently, created in love there is a primordial Presence or love that is the source of who we are. We are by our very nature in relationship with divine love and called to deeper and more complete loving. As we saw in the last reflection, overflowing from our source in divine love, at the core of our nature, is an inescapable, persistent, restless desire to be love with Love. We long to be one with love. Hadewijch reminds us of the constancy of this invitation to relationship. God is present, always has been and always will be, in all seasons new and old, …in the hot summer, the cold winter, we receive love from Love. We have an implicit but true knowledge of God ultimately rooted in the depths of our being, in our transcendentality, in our personality, in our true self.
We hear God sing:
Beloved One,
Before you were born I knit you in your mother’s womb
Created in you a reflection of my love
Conceived in love
Grounded in love
You are my beloved forever one in me.
We respond:
I centre myself in you.
May my day become a song of your love
Fill my being with your breath
Breath of life
Breath of joy
Breath of peace.
Nourished in the heart of your endless loving
Surrounded in fluids that feed the source of my being
I live in you and you in me.
I love you.
I long to be more completely one with you.
Drawn into an abyss of ever renewing oneing
Fill me with your love.
Enfolded into you my God,
My heart becomes part of your heart
I am drawn into the depths of you.
Like a foetus in the womb
My heart beat harmonizes with your heart beat.
I rest
Held, nurtured, loved,
given the greatest gift.
I sing:
“I live in your presence.
I live in you and you live in me.”
If Love is the ultimate reality we live in, the underlying source of all that is, why is it so difficult for us to
recognise God’s presence and love? Why at times does God seem so absent? Why is it that we so easily resist the only source that can fulfil our desires? Why do we live in such tangible apprehension that all is not well, that we fail to abide in love, we fail to love ourselves, each other and all created things. Why do we find it so difficult to pray? Why does fear, or what Julian of Norwich refers to as deadly dread so easily
paralyse us?
In the face of all this opposition, Love summons us to be aware of the divine presence, to be in touch with our deepest desire and to claim our heritage to be love with Love. Though our imaginations lack the expansiveness to envisage the wonder of the length and the breadth, the height and the depth of the presence of God in our being, God is faithful. Though we fail to trust that we are invited to share in the fullness of God, God is trustworthy. Though we struggle within the tension of opposites, the invitation to
fullness of life in God at the depth of our being, and the seductive allurement of a surface way of living, God continually inspires us with hope. Though there is a powerful illusive energy within the human condition (call it evil if you like) that draws us away from our centre and claims the superficial as substance, the power of love is stronger. It is critical to our wellbeing that we recognize the clanging gongs that urge us to seek gods in other places and attend to what the true source of our being invites us to be.
Let me use an example out of my own life to describe what I mean, as this dream encapsulates the underlying tension that we all struggle with as we seek to co-operate with the desire of God for our hidden selves to grow strong.
In this dream I was holding a round rock that was formed in a volcano in the depths of the earth when the Spirit hovered over the face of the deep. This rock was completely broken in half. It was open. I could see the deepest white centre in both pieces. Pale rings tinted with delicate colour encircled the centre. The rock was made of a beautiful white, dense but, iridescent substance, a little like marble, permeated with traces of pink, blue and green colours. It shone like opals. The rock had great depth and beauty. It had a sense of timelessness in its origins and ending. Out of the rock I took some beautiful marble like pieces and began to carve some shapes. Some were already complete and some yet to be carved. There was one delicate sculpture that really cried out for my attention. It was an exquisite blue green piece that had been
chiselled into, just enough, for an owl to emerge from within the stone. The eyes were strikingly penetrating. As I was gazing a cynical voice said, “You didn’t do that!” “Yes I did!” I relied. “I have spent hours on these sculptures. They are very important to me.”
The dream encapsulates for me just what this journey to become one with God involves. On one hand there is the image of the stone, an open-heart image that was formed in God who begot me in the womb before the dawn. (Ps 109: 00) I am a sculptor, able to create beautiful works of art out of this open heart. A most precious piece is the owl, a wisdom figure that will teach me how to see with the eye of the heart. The openness of this heart expresses a vulnerability that enables life and creativity to emerge from my centre in God. And yet this is not an image of total primordial blessedness. There is a cynical voice that seeks to undermine and belittle all that is creative and of God. This is the voice of the false self. It is fearful. It is an intolerant voice that if listened to has the power to lead me to seek gods in superficial living. It can
immobilise me and destroy my creativity. This voice echoes from a wound. This is not a superficial wound but something deep, a thorn in the flesh (2 Cor 112:7) that inflicts pain unrelentingly. It belongs to me, but it is not just mine. It is an expression of our original sin, our existential thrust towards non-being, collective inhumanity and communal incompleteness. On one hand we are one with God and drawn into a life of more and more complete oneing and on the other hand we are anything but one.
In this paper I will present a theology, which I will call a theology of oneing, that can inform our experience as we attempt to follow our deepest desire, confront the seduction of surface living and journey to our centre to live out of the depths of who we truly are in God as love with Love.
Oneing
The theology of oneing that I wish to develop comes from the Revelations of Divine Love recorded by Julian of Norwich (1342-1420). Oneing is a Middle English word often translated as uniting, but Julian’s concept of oneing is more powerful and dynamic than uniting. Julian’s idea of oneing is virtually untranslatable. Oned in Middle English means to be one, united, joined, blended or
fused3. Yet none of these words conveys the sense of this primordial inter-penetration of the divine and the human that preserves difference in identity. There is something mystical and indefinable about the union that oneing conveys. Julian couples the terms knitting and oneing to help impart the intimacy of the union that oneing brings. Knitting draws together multiple allusions to thread being knit, bones being knit and people being knit as in a marriage bond. In describing our relationship with Christ she says: in the knitting and the oneing Christ is our very true spouse and we his beloved wife.
(14:58.15)4. In the same spirit as Hadewijch and Mechthild, Julian appreciates that the foundation of our potential to be fully one with God takes place in our gifted origins. Each person of the Trinity plays a role in this original oneing. At creation we are oned to God (in our making God knit and oned us to (God’s self). By this oneing we are kept as clean and noble as we were made. By virtue of that precious oneing we can love and like our maker, praise and thank our maker and endlessly enjoy our maker. (14:58.6-10.) We are further oned to Christ in the incarnation (our nature which is the higher part is knit to God as we are made, and God is knit to our nature which is the lower part in taking flesh (14:57.17-19). We are also oned to the Holy Spirit in the continual sharing of divine love through grace. All blessed children who come out of God in nature will be returned to God by grace. (14:64.3-4). Human beings are created one within the Trinity within a relationship of oneing. Gifted in origins we are essentially one with divine love because God never disengages from this original oneing in any way that would separate the divine and the human. Yet as we well know we are not authentically living our original blessing; we must continue to engage in a relationship of oneing until we are wholly one with the divine. The movement is paradoxical. We are one and yet becoming more fully one.
Our task is to co-operate with the work of oneing through prayer. Julian states simply and clearly: Prayer ones the soul to God. (14:43.2). Julian is in no doubt that this prayer takes place in our souls which she describes as in the midst of our hearts. She writes: Our soul sits in God in true rest, and our soul stands in God in sure strength, and our soul is endlessly rooted in God in endless love. And therefore if we desire to have knowledge of our soul, communing and delighting in it, we are to seek our soul in our Lord God in whom it is enclosed. (14:56.14-18). When we spend time centered in our soul that is endlessly grounded in Christ in God we experience oneing. In this prayer we can do nothing but: behold (God) and enjoy with a high mighty desire to be all oned into (God) and attend to (God’s) movement, enjoy in (God’s) loving and delight in (God’s) goodness. (14: 43.41-44. Cf. 14:43.22-25). As we behold, gaze with the eye of the heart: it makes us like the one that we behold, and ones us in rest and in peace through grace. (68:49-50).
Informed by this idea that we are all called to be contemplatives, to recognize that we are one with divine love and are engaged in a dynamic process of oneing, continually discovering the unfathomable length and the breadth and the height and the depth of our selves endlessly grounded in God, I want to examine three dimensions of oneing. Each is essential to this journey: personal oneing, communal oneing and cosmic oneing with divine love. Though we will examine each dimension of oneing in turn, these are not separate, discrete processes, like ripples blending in a pond, they fuse, inter-connect, and create a pattern for a larger whole. In order to create a structure for this theology I will use the symbol of the heart as a way of drawing together various dimensions of the wonder of the mystery of oneing, which is ultimately beyond words and images. This symbol is appropriate, for as we saw in the last reflection, the heart expresses the totality of the human person as responsive to divine love incarnated in Christ and in the indwelling Spirit. In Catholic theology it symbolizes the unconditional love of Christ drawing all people into the heart of God. The symbol holds together the union of the material and the spiritual. It touches us consciously and unconsciously and carries us to a place where we can encounter ourselves enfolded and enclosed in the divine heart and the divine heart enfolded and enclosed in
us5. I will show how the symbol of the heart encapsulates personal, communal and cosmic dimensions of oneing.
Personal Oneing
The dynamic of becoming ever more fully who we are, true to the depths of our grounding in God, consciously open to the face of mystery, is a journey of coming forth from the love within the Trinity and ultimately returning to this love. On a personal level we exist in this dynamic of oneing all the days of our lives. I wish to suggest that no matter what stage of life we may be in, this desire for at-one-ment, to feel grounded in ultimate meaningfulness that is concrete, intimate and tangible never leaves us. As we
sensitise ourselves to the desire, grounded in the divine desire for our fullness
of life, we realize that the experience of becoming one with the divine takes place within the rhythm of the paschal mystery. We are inextricably linked to Christ who “holds all things in unity” (Col 1:17:b). In Christ all things are and continue to be transformed. When we reflect on our life experience in light of this union, we realize that each moment of our lives aligns with the process of living the life of Christ: carrying the cross, being crucified, spending time in the tomb, experiencing resurrection, ascending into heaven, receiving the gifts of the Spirit. The cycle repeats itself throughout the years of our lives. In the repetition of the cycle the depth and intimacy of this oneing draws us to praise. Essential to the process of oneing then is time for reflection on life experience so that we can continually align ourselves to the transforming paschal mystery made ours in Christ. Throughout our lives we are called to revisit the major events of our lives, the sorrows and joys, times of stagnation and times of growth, and reflect on these in light of the story of Christ. In this process we identify our way of the cross, name our crucifixions, enter the times where we have felt we are in the tomb, claim or resurrections, delight in our experiences of heaven, become enlightened by our pentecosts. Oneing is the process of bringing body, mind and spirit into harmony so that we can experience our memories at a variety of levels, and in the naming of life experience, enable each experience to become one with the story of Christ.
Let me give an example of how I envisage this re-membering of our memories within the healing pattern of the paschal mystery. Here I have drawn a mandala in which our inner world appears in colour and form, visible symbol and meditative experience. This mandala is like a mirror reflecting back to us, how all that we are, is drawn into the heart of the crucified Christ into the heart of divine love. The predominant symbol in the mandala is the heart. The heart at the centre is depthless. It is the dwelling place of the ever tranquil Trinity. It is the heart of the crucified that encloses my heart and yours. Anchored in the heart at the centre, a cross etches its way into the body of the mandala. It marks every experience with its transforming wisdom. Echoing the heart at the centre, is a chain of hearts. These hearts represent specific moments in our lives. A chain of hearts is a hardy pot plant that grows from a bulb. Two delicate heart shape leaves grow together on a stem. In the midst of the hearts dainty purple trumpet like flowers emerge that eventually die and form bulbs. The heart shaped leaves are lightly patterned in shades of blue green. In this mandala each of the leaves represents our infancy, childhood, teenage years, early adult, adult, mid-life etc. These include moments of pain, moments of heart ache, moments of struggle, moments of growth, moments of joy. Each leaf draws together a life-time of opposites. Dark and light, masculine and feminine, harmony and distraction, foolishness and wisdom, sickness and health, good and evil. Strangely, within the heart opposites attract. It is the contrasts that give the leaves character, create a unique beauty. Throughout the process of becoming one with the rhythm of divine love at the centre, opposites integrate and form a harmonious whole. Each memory connects through a golden thread of grace that weaves its way towards the centre, drawing a lifetime of memories into the heart of God. Gazing at the whole, we see that the movement is not slick and uniform; there is a rhythm, a circling that gradually draws the whole chain of hearts into the heart at the centre. The heart at the centre is the human heart enfolded in the divine heart until the two become one. In drawing our memories into the heart of Christ we experience oneing. Once we glimpse the paschal pattern of our living, that heals and transforms, deepening the oneing between the divine and human hearts, we can live out of this union. When we find our true source, the ground in which we live and move and have our being, there is a movement into the centre and out from the centre. In the ebb and flow of this movement towards the centre and out from the centre there is a continual widening and deepening until all that we are is influenced by the harmonious rhythm of the heart beat of God. Surrounded in love we can respond with a continuous yes to life and live as love with Love.
Communal Oneing
The relational sense that touching the ground of our being at one with the heart of the divine nourishes, immediately awakens us to the communal sense of oneing. Oneing teaches us that an individualistic vision of reality is at odds with the mutual indwelling and communion that the heart of God grounds us in. Every human being is intimately embraced and invited to unity within the heart of God. The prayer of Jesus, “may they be one” (Jn 17:21) becomes realized. Julian of Norwich has a beautiful image that encapsulates this union. When she gazes at the crucified Christ her spiritual eye is led into the wound in his side and there she sees a fair and delectable place, large enough for all humankind … to rest in, in peace and love. (10:24.6-7) When Julian looks at the crucified Christ she sees that in this moment of love, Christ draws all people into himself where he is one with collective humanity in suffering love and joy. In this experience of oneing Julian understands that the unfathomable depths of the heart of God creates a comm-unity amongst all peoples. One in the heart of God we appreciate the all-is-one nature of all people. In the prayer of oneing distinctions vanish. It is important to remember in this sense of the one-ness of all people, however, that oneing does not mean a loss of personal identity or a blurring of boundaries so that we have a weak sense of self that could be dangerous to our security and well-being.6 Rather the prayer of oneing creates a healthy sense of boundaries where our boundaries are neither too rigid or too weak. A strong sense of our true selves in God enables us to be truly ourselves and to allow others to be their true selves. Uniquely ourselves, we appreciate the inter-connectedness of our hearts in God with every other human heart. Oneing brings us to the point where we know that we do not exist outside one another but are in one another. Oneing invites us to envision our relationships in terms of mutual indwelling with one another modeled on the union that exists in our centre where our hearts are at one with the heart of God. If we take this perspective of mutual indwelling seriously we realize that we must nourish the other into being. The only life giving nourishment we can give is the gift of our loving that is grounded in divine love. When we love, we participate in enabling all people to actively participate in the great dance of oneing, to be love with Love.
When we partake in Trinitarian loving through living life from the ground of our heart where we are at one with the heart of God, we become
sensitised to our indifference, symbolized by the voice of the false self that I referred to in my dream. This tenacious capacity to choose non-being reminds us that the journey of oneing is not a quick fix. It is rather a lifelong process of compassionately acknowledging our thorns in the side that cause us to forget about the divinity we are again and again invited to live. How easily we forget. James Finley captures the tension we all live in when we become conscious of our grounding in divine love:
Such is the nature of our enlightened ignorance, the painful dance of ecstasy and indifference in which we experience our impotency to make effective our choice to be who we, in our moments of contemplative awakening, intimately know ourselves to be. It is out of all this messy stuff, deeply tasted, deeply accepted, that we are awakened to love stirring in the dark depths of our dilemma – a compassionate love that recognizes and goes forth to identify with the preciousness of all who are lost in ignorance and in the suffering ignorance spawns.7
Embraced in the compassionate heart of God we know that we can live every moment out of our oneness in the heart of God. In our moments of contemplative awakening we know this intimately. Yet there is also a pervasive ignorance, the cynical voice in my dream that thrusts us into a painful dance of ecstasy and indifference where we perceive the depth of our poverty. In this realization we uncover that we are in communion with all the lost and ignorant. We are humanity longing for God and we are humanity fragmented and distracted from what the divine is offering us. This is why God seems so absent. We spend our time looking everywhere but in God for something to fill our emptiness. Finley gives us wise advice: It is out of all this messy stuff, deeply tasted, deeply accepted, that we are awakened to love stirring in the dark depths of our dilemma. In the midst of the dark depths of the mess, named, tasted, accepted, divine love is present. Divine compassion enters our wounds and draws all that is raw, festering, weeping into the heart of the divine. When we see our incompleteness through the eyes of compassionate love that is grounded in divine compassion, we realize that it will not help if we are aggressively impatient to be perfect. It will not help if we perpetuate violence towards ourselves in our fragility and violence towards others in their incompleteness. We realize how each personal failing links into communal failing and each experience of forgiveness will affect the fractured heart of the whole of humanity. Compassion incites our passion to live justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with our God. (Micha 6:8).
Informed by this idea of communal oneing, I now have a sense of how to respond to my negative voice that failed to recognize the ground of divine love in the depths of my heart. The compassionate heart of the divine teaches me how to gently embrace this fear and place it in the heart of Christ. I draw on the part of me grounded in God to unleash the ebb and flow of compassion. Compassionately, I recognize the part of me that is un-free and less grounded. This recognition is critical because if I deny that this unenlightened self is part of me and project it onto some else, I will give it more power to control me unconsciously. If I try to get rid of it, it becomes even more tenacious. I bring it to the centre where all it encounters is love. Here it is gathered into the rhythm of the heart-beat of God where its evil intent confronts divine compassion. Divine compassion weaves a delicate pattern of love into the very place in my being where the voice arises. It reaches into my unfree places and consequently into the unfreedom of all humanity. When compassionate love flows through my being, drawing me to become one and whole in love, it affects the whole community. A change in one affects the whole. In this oneing of compassion, failing becomes loves opportunity to reclaim the ground of our divinity in the heart of God.
If we return to our mandala, the centre now becomes a sanctuary of tender nurturing. It expresses how God’s creative spirit gently draws all people to rest in divine compassion. The heart shaped leaves now represent all people are being drawn to oneness in the heart of God. In this process the golden thread of grace becomes compassion that dissolves our inhumanity in a love that exposes our preciousness and reveals that our estrangement is permeated with the divine.
Cosmic Oneing
Personal and communal oneing lead us to claim an ever more universal oneing. The landscape of our hearts is more inclusive than we could ever imagine. The love that begot the universe holds the whole world in an embrace of love. There are no limits to this heart, no limits to love. Edges continually expand, the length and the breadth, the height and the depth into a beyond-ness that embraces all. Beatruce Bruteau refers to this ecstatic oneing of all creation as the ecstasy of God.8 Earth, matter, life, body and spirit are inter-connected in the web of life in the one God created universe. Paul knew this centuries ago when he observed, it is the whole of creation, not just human beings, that waits in eager longing (Rom 8:19), for the fulfilment of all things in Christ. It is the whole of creation that is groaning in one great act of giving birth, (Rom 8:22a). It is the whole of creation that is drawn into the dance of oneing in the heart of God. The symbol of the human heart enclosed in the heart of God and the heart of God enclosed in human hearts says to us: divinity is within us and it is outside us. It not only grounds us in divine love, this oneing is limitless, it has no boundaries, it enfolds, enclose, embrace the whole of creation in the great act of giving birth to the divine.
Imbued with this profound sense of the oneness of creator, creature and creation, Teilhard de Chardin’s prayer in
Mass on the World helps us envisage how oneing in the heart of God includes all things:
Since once again Lord…I have neither bread not wine not altar, I will raise myself beyond these symbols, up to the pure
majesty of the real itself; I your priest will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the world. Over there, on the horizon, the sun has just touched with light the outermost fringe of the eastern sky. Once again, beneath this moving sheet of fire, the living surface of the earth wakes and trembles, and once again begins its fearful travail. I will place on my paten, O God, the harvest to be won by this renewal of labour. Into my chalice I shall pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the earth’s fruits. My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which in a moment will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit. Grant me the remembrance and the mystic presence of all those to whom the light is now awakening to the new day.9
Let us focus on Teilhard’s reflection that invites us to recognize the holiness and wholeness of creation. There is a transparency to the mystery that unites us here as he describes a sense of ineffable communion between the divine, himself, all people and the universe. Critical to the contemplative insight that Teilhard describes, is the open disposition of his heart. The depths of his soul laid widely open become chalice and paten. The depths of his soul, the place where he is grounded in divine love becomes a container, sacred vessels that hold the place of oneing between the heart of Christ, human hearts and the heart of the universe. In this place of oneness that becomes paten and chalice, he places the harvest to be won by the renewal of human labour, and all the sap that will be pressed out from the earth’s fruits. He gathers together symbols of creation, symbols of human creativity in creation and symbols of
Eucharist and invites us beyond the symbols to the pure majesty of the real itself. The transformation from night into dawn enacts the cosmic transformation that this eucharistic moment makes present. There is a sense that this eucharistic moment illuminates beyond the ends of the earth as the light of the sun rising touches with light the outer
fringes of the sky. The rising sun mirrors the enlightenment Teilhard experiences in awakening to divine Presence in creation. In this awakening to the divinity of the present moment he sees that the whole earth is an altar. On the earth, his altar, he can place all the labours and sufferings of the world. In this action he draws us to recognize that the story of Christ body broken and blood shared is the human story, but it is also the story of the earth. In this sacred place, the place of oneing, gifts of the earth’s harvest, sap from the earth’s fruits become one with the primordial blessedness that underlies all reality. They express Eucharist, body and blood given for us. With his heart laid widely open Teilhard recognizes the consecrating presence of the divine at one with the things of the earth. He recognizes the oneing between the earth and humanity as he gains a sense that he is part of the universe and the universe is part of him. The great sacrament of cosmic oneing is enacted in the world reveals Eucharist.
Teilhard’s prayer changes our experience of Eucharist. It helps us envisage that
Eucharist is enclosed in the world and the world is enclosed in Eucharist. When we receive the body and blood of Christ we are drawn more and more deeply into oneing in the body and blood of Christ, into the heart of Christ and the heart of the Trinity. In Eucharist our longing, searching hoping is drawn into the movement of Christ’s body broken and blood poured out drawing us and our world into a wholeness in the body of Christ. In
Eucharist the fragments of creation are transformed into one until the cosmos becomes one great
Eucharist. If we relate this idea of personal communal and cosmic oneing to the mandala I now want to add a paten and chalice to the central design. The great source of nourishment for us as we engage in this life long journey of oneing is
Eucharist the sacrament where we are one bread one body.
Conclusion
The Song of songs is a great song of oneing, a song that unites and makes all things one. The song of oneing
eliminates all boundaries. It does not exclude. The divine presence passionately yearning for us to live a life of oneing changes our vision of reality, our perceptions and expectations not only of ourselves but of others and the cosmos. We know our own darkness, our cynicism, our need for forgiveness, but we know even more profoundly how much we are loved. Make your home in me as I make mine in you. Live a life mutually indwelling me, be filled with the utter fullness of God is the song God sings to us. In the song of songs each of us has our own song to sing, but we must harmonize with others and the earth, so that the whole cosmos composes a living, breathing melody. In harmonious rhythm with divine love we circle to the centre where our heart is one with the divine. We flow out from the centre uniting all that is in the great song of oneing.
I pray that God’s infinite glory may be revealed to us at deeper and more expansive levels and that we experience ourselves hidden in Christ in God. May Christ live in our hearts through through faith and then planted in love and built on love may we have the insight to grasp the height and the depth the length and the breadth until knowing the love of Christ which is beyond all knowledge we are filled with the utter fullness of God. Glory to God whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.
Oneing
Source of all being,
Knit and oned to you
from the moment you knit us in our mothers’ wombs
you create life from life
love from love.
A fragile fabric
incomplete,
You call us to unravel fibres of our beings
until they are softly spun
pliable
dyed with colour,
bright, iridescent, reflections of you.
We feel your wounded hands,
Vulnerable loving
Enclosing
Knitting and weaving
Creating
Re-creating
Completing
Calling us from deep within
depthless, breadthless, endless oneing.
Escatic loving
making a home in human hearts
indwelling presence
centre of our being
fashioning a people one in you
singing the Song of songs
depthless, breadthless, endless oneing.
Body broken
Wine poured out
gifts from the earth’ s harvest
sap from the earth’s fruit
memory of memories
depthless, breadthless, endless oneing.
In the hands of a tender weaver we live
knit in this knot,
and oned in this oneing,
and made holy in this holiness .
(Kerrie Hide)
My beloved lifts up his voice and says to me
My beloved lifts up her voice and says to me,
Come then my love
My lovely one come.
For see winter is past,
The rains are over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth. The season of glad songs has come.
(Song of Songs 2:10-12)
References:
1 Hadewijch: The Complete Works, Translated by Mother Columbia Hart (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 224.
2 Mechthild of Magdeburg The Flowing Light of the Godhead, Translated by Frank Tobin (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 1.22.50.
3 New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Edited by Lesley Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 1998.
4 Translations are my own. References refer to A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of
Norwich. Edited by Edmund College and James Walsh (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978). References refer to revelation number, chapter number and line numbers.
5 See John "Make your home in me as I make mine in you".
6 See James Finley The Contemplative Heart (Notre Dame: Sorin Books), 2000, Chapter 6, 133-149.
7 The Contemplative Heart, 143.
8 Beatruce Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy: The Creation of a Self- Creating World (New York: Crossroad, 1997).
9 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Hymn of the Universe. Translated by Simon Bartholomew (London: Collins, 1965), 19.