When I think of my life I have come to believe that we do not really know who we fully are except in relationship with God. Only when we rest in God, as Augustine said, can we find the safety, the space, and the often scary freedom to be who we are, and all that we are, and much more than we think we are — selfish, shortsighted sinfulness and all. I have come to realize this often in my continuous awareness of how much I need to be forgiven for my sinfulness! It strikes me that only when we find ourselves in God, and live and see through God’s eyes, that everything belongs and everything makes sense. All other systems and perspectives in our world exclude, expel, punish, and protect to find an identity for their followers in some kind of ideological perfection or separate, individual superiority. Today, more than I have ever seen, many think “the contaminating element” must be searched out, isolated, and often punished or done away with. This wasted effort keeps us from the centrally important task of love and union, a love and union that is being left behind by a ragged individualism. We cannot be one who is known and heard only by who and what we want dismissed and forgotten.
So to have a wide open and unobscured presence with the Only Holy One — with God — is to know who I am in my truest and deepest being. When we allow ourselves to be completely received, totally gazed upon by the Only Holy One who knows everything and receives everything, we are indestructible. If only we can learn how to receive the perfect gaze of the Only Holy One, and to be mirrored by the Only Holy One, then the voices of the human crowd, even the loudest and most negative ones, have little power to influence and hurt us. To taste the presence of God gives us a glimpse, a hint, of how God looks at us.
Standing humbly before God’s gaze unifies our greatest desires in life. It frees us from an undisciplined imagination where we are constantly looking here and there and everywhere. Standing before God literally allows us to be composed and gathered in one place. We can be in one place; we can be here, now. We can stop looking always over there for tomorrow’s happiness. As the Apostle Paul wrote, “now is the favorable time, today is the day of salvation” 2 Corinthians 6:2.
We see that Paul understands this in a most beautiful paragraph from
2 Corinthians when he says: “We with our unveiled faces will gradually reflect like mirrors the brightness of the Lord. All will grow brighter and brighter as we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect”
2 Corinthians 3:18. That’s it! Our life doesn’t have to do with being perfect. It has to do with being in relationship with God, holding onto union with God as tightly as God holds onto us, staying in there.
The Only Holy One who knows all and receives all, as a mirror does, has no trouble forgiving all. It’s not a matter of being correct, but of being connected intimately with our loving Father.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.
From the Bible:
“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” Galatians 2:20.
“But whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him”
1 Corinthians 6:17.
“By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit”
1 John 4:13.
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing” John 15:1-27.
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” Romans 8:1.
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