John Main, The Reality of God, Meditatio Series 2017 B
Two great Christian words are meditation and contemplation. Meditation is ‘remaining in the centre’, being rooted in the centre of your own being. Contemplation is ‘being in the temple’ with him; contemplare – to be within the temple with him. The temple is your own heart. And the essence of being with him, in the vision of the early Church, is an absolute oneness. This is what we’ve got to try to proclaim to the world, that it is our destiny to be divinised, to be one with the Spirit of God. Divinisation is something that is utterly beyond our imagination, utterly beyond our own power of understanding to comprehend. But here is the mystery that St Paul speaks of: it is not beyond our capacity to experience it in love. It is our capacity to love and to be rooted in love that is the essence our own divinisation.
Listen to St Paul when he speaks about the reality of this, the presentness of it. ‘For he it was who brought us salvation (2 Tim 1:9). Salvation is deliverance from all our own limitations. Salvation is the Jewish word for deliverance from bondage, from slavery, into the wonderful liberty of the children of God.
It is he who brought us salvation and called us to a dedicated life, not for any merit of ours, but for his own purpose and his own grace, which was granted to us in Christ Jesus from all eternity but has now at length been brought fully into view by the power of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For he has broken the power of death and brought life and im-mortality to light through the gospel. (2 Tim 1:9-10)
The gospel is just that ‘good news’ of our deliverance from slavery. If we wanted to put that into terminology for our own time, it is the deliverance from our own egoism, from everything in us that isolates us, from everything in us that limits us, into the limitless love of God. And it is the reality of this that we must be open to in our prayer, the presentness of it. This gift of Christ, the gift of his Spirit, is the very basis of all reality. And the art of living, the art of all human living, is not to live at the surface, not to live at the level of trivia, but to live out of what Jesus called that spring of eternal life welling up within us.
St Augustine — Confessions, Book I, Chapter 2, in the Schaff edition
“I could not exist unless I were in Thee from whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things.”.
