L.J. Milone shares a reflection on the Fourth Sunday of Easter Gospel reading from John, chapter 10.
Our images of God say more about us than they do about God, for God is beyond all images.
The resurrection is not a one-time event. It happens whenever we wake up to the tender and merciful presence of God within us. The resurrection starts with this awakening and extends into eternal life. The power of divine light, life, and love transfigure us to the extent that we die to self. But, what is not in question is the essential truth about us. We can say, with Jesus, “The Father and I are one.” Each and every single one of us is immediately one with God, but we do not know it, draw on it, or live it. Unfortunately, some will interpret the previous sentence as off-putting, irrelevant, or perhaps even approaching heresy. It comes down, I believe, to how we imagine God. If we see God as judge and eternal policeman, then our oneness with God may cause fear. It may lead the self-proclaimed righteous ones to denounce it as base heresy. Our images for God say more about us than they do about God, for God is beyond all images.
In our church, there are many people who take their images of God to be God. They confuse their understanding of and language about God for the reality of God. Some think that God has sent them material wealth, and therefore they are obeying the Word more than others. For them, success is a sign that God is affirming their holiness, but those who are poor are thought to be so because of divine punishment. Speaking of punishment, there are many Catholics who take God to be a cosmic avenger doling out just (in their view) punishments on the ungodly, those defiant of religious authority, or those deemed filthy or dangerous: migrants, the LGBTQ community, socialists, or immigrants.
Our language about God reveals more about our own wishes, desires, needs, and fears than it does about God. We become the god we worship. God-identity and self-identity go together. Therefore, our behavior and our language reveal our idolatry. When we identify with body, behavior, thoughts, feelings, possessions, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and pretty much anything else under the sun, we create false gods, idols. To come to know God is one with us, we have to put the words of Meister Eckhart into practice: let yourself go and let God be God. This means letting go of our ideas of God, which are always attached to ideas of the self. The root idea to let go of is the idea – a monumental illusion, really – that we are separate from the absolute mystery God. Nothing is separate! Everything is one with the infinite mystery.
According to a medieval philosopher and theologian named John Scotus Eriugena, an Irish scholar, all things are manifestations of the absolute mystery of God. Eriugena waxes poetic, “For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing else but the apparition of what is non-apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, the utterance of the unutterable, the access to the inaccessible, the understanding of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the superessential, the form of the formless, the measure of the measureless, the number of the unnumbered, the weight of the weightless, the materialization [thickening] of the spiritual, the visibility of the invisible, the placing of the not-placed, the temporality of the timeless, the definition of the infinite, the circumscription of the uncircumscribed.” This is the mystery of Christ. It is our mystery, too. God becomes flesh unto death on a cross and resurrection. Through this salvific event, God unveils our essential nature: the innermost reality of every creature is the nothing whose light is all lights, whose being is all beings. We are, in our core, mystery like God is mystery. God-identity and self-identity go together.
The second half of each pair in Eriugena’s quote above testifies to the infinite, transcendent, and incomprehensible nature of God. When this divine nature manifests as a creature, it hinges on God’s kenosis or self-emptying. Incarnation is the process of passing from the divine nothing to a created something. Therefore, our spiritual path, divinization, is about passing from something – our egos, who we think we are – to the nothing or the divine mystery. The Risen Jesus was crucified first. Our risen life appears once we let go, that is, once we surrender our tightly held ideas about who we think we are and who we suppose God is. To experience the resurrection is, at least initially, to wake up from our illusory beliefs and to an incredible intimacy with the superessential God, to use one of Eriugena’s words.