‘God is your Being’

When we were away last week, we had someone stay in our house to look after our cats. As I drove her to the train station yesterday, she mentioned that she’d read our book The Missing Peace during her stay.

She said she was surprised but interested to discover that Christianity had a tradition of meditation, then added, ‘I have a problem with Christianity.’

Are we essentially bad, fundamentally flawed?

She said she couldn’t accept the Christian teaching that we are essentially bad, fundamentally flawed – and shared how she had cried with relief to discover the radically positive teachings of Buddhism about our true nature.

I mentioned how many Christians I’ve seen cry with relief when they hear the radically positive teachings of early Christianity and its contemplative tradition. That we are not essentially bad, but essential good. That we are not fundamentally flawed, but made in the pristine image of God.

Clearly, we can become deeply estranged from the deepest truth of who we are. We can fail to live in the likeness of this truth (and concoct all sorts of theological theories about this). But we can never stop being the likeness of God, any more than we can change our DNA.

And this is why we can find our way home to God, who is our home: we are made of our home. Nothing needs to be added, only uncovered, recognised. In Buddhist terms, the pristine nature of our being – of awareness – is the seed of Buddhahood. In Christian terms, it is the seed of Glory, of being the radiance of God. (1)

Ancient teachings on stillness and knowing

The Bible is full of teachings on the relationship between stillness and knowing. Perhaps the most famous is found in Psalm 46, ‘Be still and know that I am God’ (Psalm 46:10)  Stillness of mind is necessary for knowing. For knowing who we are. For knowing each other. For knowing God.

All of which, our tradition teaches, is to participate in a single all-encompassing knowing. God’s knowing. In the words of Meister Eckhart, ‘The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing and one love.’ (3)

Does that sound extraordinary?

In the Gospel of John, we read how some wanted to stone Jesus for blasphemy, thinking it wrong that a human being should make himself out to be a god. Jesus said to them, ‘Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, “You are gods?”’ (John 10:34).

‘God became human so that humans might become God’ is a fundamental teaching that runs like a golden thread through the early centuries of Christianity. God became human so that humans might realise and manifest the divine truth of their being. However radical this might sound to our ears today, to say this is simply to follow Jesus and traditional Christian teaching.

‘God is your being,’ says the anonymous medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing. (4)

‘I saw no difference between God and our essential being, it seemed to be all God,’ says Julian of Norwich. (5)

‘My only me is God,’ St. Catherine of Genoa cries out in delight.  ‘In my soul I see nothing but God.’ (6)

Or as the contemporary philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart recently put it:

‘I’m just me. I’m just a finite being. But the ground of all I am, the essence of all I am, the existence of all I am, is not my own. Considered in terms of my source and end…I’m God…there is nothing other than God that gives being.’ (7)

An intoxicating claim. Can we really believe it?

Despite what many of us may have been told, the deepest truth of who we are is not depraved, but divine, our deepest impulse is not towards evil, but towards good, towards love.

I’m continually surprised at how surprised so many Christians are to hear this. This is part and parcel of the original message of the gospel. How could it be otherwise when God is our being, and God is Love? (1 John 4:16)

Our deepest ‘me’ is a boundless capacity for love. When we begin to see who we are, we become aware our lives will be transformed if we live from our deepest ‘me.’ We increasingly want to live a life of love, simply because this is what it means (what it “looks like”) to be who we are.

Needless to say, this opening of awareness does not mean that our selfish habits and unruly passions suddenly vanish overnight. But as we come to see that our deepest ‘me’ is pure love, pure peace, we increasingly want to live a life that reflects this, which we now understand is just to live as the truth of who we really are.

All we are doing in meditation, is learning to centre ourselves in who we really are. We are learning to be fully, radically human, to be the love, the peace which is the deepest truth of our being.

Our infinite value…

We no longer measure our value in terms of what we do, what we achieve. We know that our infinite value rests in what we are, and that being the simple truth of what we are is all that matters. Our understanding of the purpose of our life changes, opens.

To glimpse that our deepest truth is love, is peace, is to discover that the purpose of our life is to be love, to be peace – to allow what we are ceaselessly being given to manifest as a gift for those around us and for the world. No analysis is needed to know this. No demands have to be made or met. All that is needed is an availability, an openness to the wonder of our being, to the wonder of what it means to be.

Imagine how our relationships, our communities, our world would benefit if everyone had a sense of their real me.’ a sense of their infinite value and importance; if we could communicate this understanding to only one other person. Our relationships, our communities, our world would be unimaginably helped if people knew the wonderful truth of who they are.

‘Practice stillness. Just do this,’ said my teacher.

‘Eventually your mind will become still enough for you to notice something wonderful.

‘You will notice who you are. Who you really are.’