God is real, unlike the mythical gods
who have no existence at all.
But God is no body and no soul
God is the life of the soul
which is the life of the body –
God is the Life of lives.
Until the 1960s, people were taught meditation
as an exercise of the rational mind
drawing upon the three powers of the soul:
memory/understanding (reason)/will.
There was no training in contemplation –
the experience of the living God in silence.
The contemplative person eventually realizes
s/he no longer knows what God is
because God is not a thing but a Thou
who constantly says “I AM”
which allows me to constantly say “I am, too!”
God makes me real.
All the contemplative knows is: God is Love –
the core energy of evolution and its goal.
Love-energy is the most universal/tremendous/
mysterious of all cosmic forces –
“The physical structure of the universe is love” –
Teilhard de Chardin
But what gets in the way of love is anxiety –
“Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, except sin” –
Saint Francis de Sales
To combat anxiety we need to stay focused on God
particularly the Incarnate God, the Christ
who shows us “Perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4:18).
Indeed, the hymn in Colossians 1: 15-20 makes Christ’s divinity
as great or greater than the prologue of John’s Gospel
(John 1: 1-18) which declares that
Jesus is not only God
as the Cosmic Christ
He created the whole cosmos
and is its goal: The Beginning and the End –
the Alpha and the Omega.
Intelligent Christian Spirituality 