Our Lady Help of Christians Abbey

                                                                       Being God

     “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:1-5).” In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. In the beginning was Being and that Being is God. All things were created through Being, but were created empty and void. Being went forth to fill the creation, to make man. Man has no Being. The light of man is Being. Man is empty and void, is nothing. Being does not reside outside of man, as another to be attained, but is man. Being does not act through man, but acts through itself in man. Being is Consciousness, man is self-conscious, man Becomes when he lets go of self-consciousness and embraces Consciousness. Man becomes Being, becomes God, in allowing God to fill his emptiness and to Be through his nothingness.
We are not; we simply are conduits for Being. I have said nothing new or revolutionary, although many will think so, rather I reassert that we are one with God, with Being and Consciousness, and we only get in our own ways of that oneness. We place our egotistical selves in the path. We stop becoming and alienate ourselves from Being. Perfection, the path is Being, Heaven is not a place, but Being. That is the secret. Everyone is concerned with getting to a place, or doing the right things. That is a fallacy. Being is our destiny and our perfection. It is in our grasps and our essence, but we try to make it fit our definitions and concepts, it won’t it is Being.
Many would ask, “but what is the nature of this Being or Consciousness?” The answer is that there is no answer, except to say that; “God is love”. Yet, even with this insight into the Being of the Divine, there are those who will say this love or that love is bad, is evil. Evil is that absence of good; it is not Being. Being is love, how can any love not be good, if love is Being? William Butler Yeats said that, “But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement; (ln 15 – 16).” While trying to be sarcastic, Yeats hit upon the secret of human existence. Being, God has built God’s mansion in the place of excrement, in humanity. In building God’s mansion in this place of excrement, God transforms that waste into God’s own Being.
The act of Becoming is the ultimate act of love, the total empting of the sense of self, to truly empty, a waiting receptacle, so as to be filled up by God. When we let go of our conceptions and myopic vision, we see things through God’s knowing and we enter into God’s understanding. Many call this a mystical journey or ascetic way of life and it is, I suppose, but more then that, it repairs our marred self-image “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…. Then God said, ‘Let us create man in our own image.’” We do not believe that God has a physical body, God is fundamentally spirit, so then what does this mean that God created us in God’s own image? That God imprinted on our souls God’s own very essence. We, through life, mar and putrefy this essence, but it is still there. It is covered over by who we think we are and become, but God is still there. We have to cast off this self-image and ego to cleanse the image, the essence of God and become who God made us to be, one with God’s self.
To be “in love with God” or to be “lovers with God” is not enough, not by far, because it still makes God the other focus of a sense of self and not the center of one’s emptiness. We must accept that we are “the place of excrement”. It is my very emptiness, and my very unworthiness that allows God to be through me. I become, by being empty, an open conduit, an empty cup, waiting to be filled up and that is just what the Divine does, fills us up with Itself and makes us who we truly are. We are created and recreated in God to be creatures of love, to be God on earth. Yet, we cannot do this until we let go and allow love (i.e. God) to flow through us.
We all tend to think, thanks to Rene Descartes’; in terms of ourselves as center of our universe and all things have meaning and relevance only as measured by how they pertain to us. “I think therefore I am” makes us egocentric. Being egocentric, all other things become outside and the other. God does too. For us there is the self-consciousness and the consciousness of God. We believe they are two distinct and separate things. This belief is a lie. There is only one consciousness that is the consciousness of divinity itself. We are not separate things; we are one thing. Our egotistical self gets in the way of our seeing our oneness with God. We are not a separate thing from God from Consciousness; rather we are one with it. We are nothing before God’s self-awareness, consciousness, love fills us up, and we are only empty vessels. We can do no good of our own; it is God acting through God’s self in us that does any good. We do evil when we fall under the lie of self-consciousness and get in our own way (Merton 22-5).
Yet, mark that my accretions are only that we are one with God, that being created in God’s image and likeness means unequivocally that our souls are mirrors to reflect God’s own Being into the world in which we live. The Catholic Church teaches in no uncertain terms that if we want to know what it means to be human we must look to the person of Jesus Christ and just as assuredly the Church also teaches that to understand everything that God wants to reveal about God’s own self we must look to Jesus Christ. Too many people present these two statements as separate truths, but they are not, they are one truth the Truth of Who Christ is and who we are called to be. These two truths are opposing sides to the same coin, one cannot exist without the other, but too many believers do try to divide them from each other.
Yet, our Church teaches us that in all of Her statements about what it is to be human and to be Christian, that we are the very image of God and (the body of) God on earth. Mystics and doctors of the Church teach that if we truly knew how much God was in each person we would genuflect every time we met some one. By article of faith this is what we are supposed to believe, but we tend to be very parsimonious in its practice. What was it that was written? “It is by your deeds that you shall be known.” We ascribe to believe in the very sanctity and divinity of human existence “from the womb to the tomb” but we bend over backwards to not pay respect and reverence to our fellow human beings right in front of us. The book of Revelations tells us that God will judge us in how we have dealt with our brothers and sisters, because “When you have failed to do thus for the least of my brethren, you have failed to do so for me.” There are so many hidden truths in so direct words, like our oneness with Christ in our human condition and through him our oneness with God in divinity. Yet we usually chose to turn our backs on this divinity and our fellow brothers and sisters. Our “modern age” is a consequence of this very turning away from community and to emptiness. Natsume Soseki wrote in Kokoro, “You see loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves.” What Soseki-san is getting at is the cost of turning our backs on the divine in our selves and thusly in the divine in our brothers and sisters, we seek freedom and find frivolousness, seek independence and find emptiness and seek our egotistical selves and find loneliness, a loneliness that is not just a absence from other humans truly and deeply touching our lives, but in this absence, we find an absence of God touching our lives. When we become our egotistical, Cartesian selves we become closed and locked boxes keeping God out.
What is our egotistical self? Pride. Many theologians, myself included believe that pride was the original sin which tainted and marred our image of God and our relationship with God, the very sin that caused death to enter the world. St Paul tells us in no uncertain terms that; “The wages of sin are death.” So then to be centered in the self is a pride filled way of being and not being who God created us to be. We pave the way for our own death, and much more then the death of the body, but death of the soul, by not surrendering our sense of self and accepting that we are nothing but reflections of God in the world. We embrace death by clinging to our egotistical selves. Perhaps this is what Christ meant when he said; “Those who lose their life for my sake shall have eternal life.” It is not until we are willing to stop being who we think we are and willing to be who we are called to be; God alive in the world, that we will realize our nothingness and embrace our everythingness in embracing our oneness with the Divine. Above all we must remember that we are one with Christ and in Christ we are one with God. Christ himself says as much in the Gospel according to John; “. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.” It is our oneness in Christ who is our very God and therefore our oneness with God that we find fulfillment and completion. It is casting off the sin of pride and the sin of being egotistical enough that we think we are the center of our own universe and embrace our true being, our oneness with God, that we will find Shakespeare’s “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns, puzzles the will, (3:1:78 – 9)”. We will find our own perfection and our own fulfillment by being God and letting God flow through us to prefect and make whole all of God’s creation the puzzle of death we become meaningless. It is important to see in the human form exactly what Hamlet sees:
. . . What [a] piece of work is
a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in
form and moving, how express and admirable in action,
how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god! the
beauty of the world; the paragon of animals; and yet to me
what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me –
nor woman neither. . . . (2:2:297 – 303)
We as living breathing human beings are the pinnacle of God’s creative endeavor, but we are only “quintessence of dust” even given that. It is not till we can release our self and embrace the wonders of what God is in us that we can see the Truth.
My own journey down the mystical path of entering into God was when I first fell in love with God, when God and I became lovers. God became less distant and more real. The more love I gave my lover the more love I had to give. This is very much like our first childhood sweetheart. Tim O’Brien writes about his first love in The Things They Carried which I hope will take us all back to our first love so we can know the first steps on the path to God.
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones – that kind of love…. For me, though, it was very special. Down inside I had important things to tell her, big profound things, but I couldn’t make any words come out. I had trouble breathing. Now and then I’d glance over at her, thinking how beautiful she was…. I wanted to find some way to let her know how I felt, a compliment of some sort, but all I could manage was a stupid comment…. and both of us were very careful to avoid the awkwardness of eye contact. Which was how we knew about being in love. It was pure knowing. Neither of us, I suppose, would’ve thought to use that word, love but by the fact of not looking at each other, and not talking, we understood with a clarity beyond language that we were sharing something huge and permanent… (228 – 30)
It is this awkward, unknowing but complete assurance type of love of which I speak when I talk about my first falling in love with God. Also I chose this particular expression of first love because I believe it strikes very close to the heart of what Christ meant in saying; “Amen, I say to you. Whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it. (Mk 10:15).”
As God and I moved deeper into our love relationship, God stopped being that image of fright to terrify you into doing to right thing for fear of damnation. God became much more then a lover, God became my friend. I often would relax myself and allow myself to drift into the bosom of my friend and I soon discovered that the more I was with God the more I was becoming a willing tool, then I took that final leap from being a tool, a separate thing to being a drop of water in an infinite ocean of God, poured out to water God’s own good garden.
I, by no means, became God, but rather I discovered the God who resides in my very being, a God who made me with a spark of her own Being. I was finally able to find myself, but only by losing my self to that spark and that spark became the happy funeral pyre of my egotistical-self, from which my new being, my Oneness with my friend rose like the mythical Phoenix from its own ashes. I became the realization of Miester Eckhardt’s two-part prayer that had so confused me for so long. “I pray thee God, rid me of God.” and “God and I are one.”
Like Eckhardt, I had just to strip myself of the external visages of a God lost in ritual and other people’s expectations. I had to find my friend, I had to find myself and I found both in the same place. I am the image of the Risen Christ, and I am His hands and words in a hurting world today. I am a conduit for God to reach out and touch his hurt and wounded people. But then so are you. It is crucial to be rid of our sense of self in order to embrace ourselves, our God who loved us so much that he created us with a spark of her own self in us; a spark that we must fan into a bonfire of love and goodwill.
There is another reason I chose O’Brien’s story. Later in his book he says; “And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body – her life (236).’ In much the same way through my writing I hope to save the lives of all those sparks, all those people who are lost and looking, who are hurt and seek healing, who are weak and want strength and who are lonely and want to be loved.