A Message of Gratitude from Contemplative Outreach Puget Sound North
As Advent leads us, in just hours, to the Christmas Holy Day and Season, Contemplative Outreach and this chapter would like to express gratitude for your presence and participation in the transformative practice of Centering Prayer. We'd also like to wish you all the blessings and grace of this Christmas Holy Day about to come, and the Christmas Season to come. You are a gift to everyone in this community of silence!
As our gift, we'd like to share the closing meditation from our recent Contemplative Advent Retreat.
As we draw nearer to the celebration of the Incarnation of the Word at Christmas, a lot of attention is given to the unique and salvific way that God came to be with us-Emmanuel-in the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, and rightly so. Yet there are other ways that we can call to mind the continual manner by which Christ remains with us long after Jesus’ earthly life, death and resurrection.
The Franciscan Friar Dan Horan points out that while beliefs vary among different Christian denominations, it’s worth remembering that more than fifty years ago, the second Vatican council taught that Christ is made present at the celebration of the Mass not only in the Eucharistic species of bread and wine…but also in his word-Sacred Scripture, and in the baptized faithful”…(all of us). Horan asks “But how well do we recognize the presence of Christ in one another?”
He tells the story of how Saint Augustine once instructed a community of newly baptized Christians on the subject of the Eucharist. Among other things he famously told them about the Eucharistic species of bread and wine. “Be what you see; receive what you are”. He understood what the twenty-first century Church has recalled. We are the body of Christ, made one by baptism, united by the Holy Spirit, and strengthened on the journey of discipleship by the Eucharist.
As the celebration of the Incarnation comes closer, may we also take this time to prepare ourselves to be more aware of Christ’s presence as Emmanuel in those around us”
That recalls the experience recorded by a Trappist Monk in Louisville, Kentucky. That journal entry began…
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs.”
That sentence began a deeply insightful passage in Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander…and it described the Epiphany of Thomas Merton that day. It’s worth considering a condensed version…
“I have the immense joy of being…a member of the race in which God Himself became incarnate…now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. There are no strangers!
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secdret beauty of their heart, the depths of their hearts where neither sin, nor desire, nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other…
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness that is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship.
It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see those billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”
Blessings to you this Christmas!
Contemplative Outreach Puget Sound North
