From Division to Oneness

Perhaps some of our difficulties with scripture come from trying to read it through a strongly dualistic lens – a lens that sees in terms of winners and losers, of insiders and outsiders, right and wrong. Contemplative Christianity invites us to see things differently.

St Paul: Passionate, Human, and Misunderstood

St Paul might be one of the most important and most misunderstood teachers in Christian history.  ‘A passionate man, powerfully, even overwhelmingly impressive in some ways,’ writes Rowan Williams, ‘and sometimes  manipulative and possessive. When his anger runs away with him, he can be seriously abusive towards his enemies; even when his anger isn’t running away from him, he can be fairly fierce.’(1) Paul is extraordinarily human.  He sounds more than a bit like us. But his forcefulness, his passion, also comes through in how he speaks out against injustice and cruelty, against so many forms of division, in the radical vision of absolute equality to be found in his teachings.

The Damascus Road and a Vision of Oneness

As Paul and others tell us, something extraordinary happened when he was travelling on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3-4). Paul is heading to Damascus in order to arrest members of the Christian community there. He plans to take them back to Jerusalem for punishment, perhaps even execution.

Up to this point, Paul is what we might a call  fundamentalist, an extremist, a religious zealot. With great energy, he’s been doing everything he can to destroy the movement whose members refer to themselves as followers of ‘The Way’. Paul is utterly convinced that he knows who is ‘righteous’ and who is not, who is right and who is wrong, who are acceptable to God, who must be judged and punished. He is filled with murderous intent in the name of God. And then everything changes.

Suddenly, he is enveloped in Divine light, the blinding luminosity or glory of God’s presence called the shekhinah in Hebrew scripture, the glory of God’s presence. This radiant presence is sometimes described as having a density that it makes difficult to stand, as being like a luminous fog in which it’s difficult to breathe. Ordinary life is interrupted, suspended, suffused in light.

Paul falls to the ground. We might understand this as Paul being brought into sudden contact with the ground of his being – the source of his life. Lying on the ground, enveloped in blinding light, Paul hears a voice saying, ‘Why are you persecuting me?’ Not, ‘Why are you persecuting those who follow me?’ Paul asks, ‘Lord, who are you? The voice answers, ‘I am Jesus, whom you persecute.’ And Paul replies, ‘Lord, what do you want me to do?’ Brought into sudden contact with the ground of his being, enveloped in the luminosity of God’s love, Paul begins his journey of en-lightenment, of being brought ever more deeply into the light.

Christ Revealed in the Light of Unity

‘Why are you persecuting me?’ The Christ who Paul encounters is not an individual dead man come back to life. Paul is shown how the lives of all those he wished to bring to justice are inseparable from and utterly bound up with the one life who speaks to him in the light – who is the light that enlightens all people.

Meister Eckhart and the Path of Receptive Silence

Thirteen centuries after Paul, one of his most gifted students, the great medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, speaks with extraordinary insight and poetry about this gradual process of enlightenment, and how we might dispose ourselves to it. Let go of all your ideas about God, he says. Come to God naked, simple, open, a single point of pure receptiveness. ‘Be silent and let God work and speak within.’(2). Just a cupboard which is bare is ready to be filled with food, and a glass which is empty is ready to receive the wine, come with a naked mind, open and ready to receive.

This is the openness, the receptivity we cultivate in meditation. We let go of the thoughts and images that arise in our mind, simply to hold ourselves open, ready, for something deeper – for that which is beyond our words, beyond all we might imagine. We trust and wait, like an empty cupboard waiting to be filled with food, like an empty glass waiting to be filled with wine, ready to receive the truth, the love, the peace which is beyond all understanding (Phil. 4:7).

When a person opens themselves to God like this, with love, says Eckhart, they are ‘un-formed, then in-formed and trans-formed in the divine uniformity.’ (3) Their life is transfigured in the oneness of God. They become the likeness of this oneness – to live, to love, as one.

From Division to Oneness: The Foundation of Peace

Before he set off to Damascus, Paul was a man of unbending sharp edges. On the road to Damascus, his life-changing encounter with the Christ, the radiance of the God, brings about a profound interior revolution. The perceptual framework Paul has operated within up to this point is swept away. Obliterated. Rigid notions of division are replaced with a vision of absolute union. His deeply-held belief in separateness is dissolved in the revelation of oneness. The Divine light which brings him to the ground eventually becomes so intimately woven into Paul’s sense of who he is that when he looks within, he doesn’t see Paul, and says, ‘I live now no longer I, but Christ lives in me’ (Galatians 2:20). Common ideas of personal collapse. Common ideas of interpersonal identity collapse. Gazing into the ground of who we are in God all the usual markers of identity we use to describe ourselves, to separate ourselves from each other, are nowhere to be found: ‘no Jew or Greek, or slave or free, or male or female, because all are one in Christ’ (Galatians 3:28).

The realization of oneness is the deepest foundation of peace within us, and the deepest foundation of peace between us. It is the deepest basis for compassion and justice, for our care of each other and of our precious world.

‘When it is truly seen,’ wrote Julian of Norwich, ‘no person can separate themselves from another.’ (4)

As Meister Eckhart prayed, ‘May God grant us this oneness.’ (5)