A Theological Note on Simply Being

(August reflections are all short pieces from Travelling Light)

What I’m setting out to do is to show that any attempt at reaching union with God that is based on the deepening awareness of one’s own inner being, or of the inner heart of anybody or anything, has a basis in the true meaning of the mystery of creation and of incarnation. This is how I see it. Out of the overwhelming intensity of divine love, God created the world in the first place for companionship. ‘God is shared joy,’ taught St Thomas Aquinas, ‘and share joy demands company.

From that miraculous moment onwards the world was permeated by God’s in dwelling love and energy. The Hebrew scriptures make this quite clear. The pre-Christian contemplatives saw God’s glory and felt God’s presence in everyone and everything. In their silent wonder, the universal and indwelling love and meaning began to become more obvious. The very nature of creation, they began to understand, revealed the nature of God.

In the one person of Jesus, we find the unique and irrevocable meeting between creation’s graced openness to divine fulfilment and God’s creative and loving desire to achieve this intimacy. In him was completed and perfected the first longing of creation for God and God’s own desire to fulfil that longing by becoming eternally united with humanity and creation.

In him, the listening ear of a groaning and straining creation heard the divine music it was coded to hear from the beginning, the unceasingly uttered word of a self surrendering God. Christ revealed, once-for-all and in  his own human self, the ‘hidden agenda’ of God’s initial creation, by being at once ‘the way forward’ for the final and unrepeatable breakthrough of that creation into God and, at the same time, by being ‘the way in’ for the ever-approaching self-disposing, divine emptying of God into the world that God first conceived out of love.

 (Travelling Light p 186)