The Face Of The Deep预览

The Spirit of Unconditional Love

This all reminds me of a section from one of Thomas Merton’s letters. The passage is written to a “man of the world,” who was corresponding by mail with the monk, a man who was deeply struggling with his unworthiness before God. Merton wrote to him:

God is … the Seer and the Seeing and the Seen. God seeks Himself in us, and the aridity and sorrow of our heart is the sorrow of God who is not known in us, who cannot yet find Himself in us because we do not dare to believe or to trust the incredible truth that He could live in us, and live there out of choice, out of preference … we exist solely for this, to be the place He has chosen for His presence, His manifestation in the world, His epiphany. But we make all this dark and inglorious because we fail to believe it, we refuse to believe it.

Jesus, the Beloved was seen, by the Father, by the Spirit. For all the weakness of form that the Word made Flesh took on, he was loved in wholeness, in totality, in truth. He, the cornerstone was laid there in the river. We are all being built into a temple around him, a place for the joyous glory, for his Spirit like a dove to descend upon, to reside with. A place for God to rest. That is very good.

Through the righteousness of Jesus the Beloved, we are “very good.” In some mystery of paradoxical grace, God chooses to find himself in us.

The scripture is clear. Paul’s theology on this particularly so. All of us “in Christ” are … in Christ. When God looks on his people, and all the individual members of his people, he has chosen to see the face of his Beloved. No manner of sin, or folly, of ignorance, or unworthiness can remove us. Our life is hidden with Christ on high, we carry his nature, him the firstborn of many brothers and sisters, and every single member of the family bears him resemblance—even if we can’t for the life of us see it ourselves.

We are our Beloved’s, and our Beloved is ours. The Dove of the Beloved found a place to rest its foot, and now brings all the life of creation and recreation, making and remaking, the powers of binding and loosing, to each and to all of us.

For God, the whole body of Christ went into the waters and came up from the waters. The whole body of Christ receives the Spirit. The whole body of Christ is the Beloved.

You. Me.