LETTING GOD ACT

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For those progressing on the spiritual journey, even when the consoling aspect of the Divine Presence dissipates because of excessive activity or too much thinking, an interior presence arises that becomes more and more permanent. A shift in consciousness begins to take place. Our rational consciousness is transcended by the awakening of intuitive consciousness. The rational level is not rejected; we simply become free of its limitations. Reason remains available and functional for ordinary daily life, human relationships, and all the needs of embodied activity, but does not overshadow or take away the deeper and abiding awareness of the Divine Presence. How can we be thinking beings and not think? The Divine Presence beyond all thought is a state that flows from being one with what happens in each nanosecond of time. The divine activity is taking place everywhere all at once. No one owns it or possesses it. It just is without any limit or boundaries. The presence and action of the Spirit embraces perfect unity and infinite diversity. To seek for enlightenment is to pray for the reward of one’s efforts to serve God. It is not yet complete detachment from self. The dissolution of the false self is the opening to true freedom and union with God. It leads to the experience of inner resurrection, which is to be taken over more and more completely by the Spirit. To know the living God we have to share the sorrow of the Divine Heart. God puts up with endless human error, excess, and sometimes malice, in order to get across to us the most important realities of life, of which God’s unconditional forgiveness and love for everyone is the foremost. We have to be humbled and ground to dust for this experience of divine love to manifest in us. It also happens with varying degrees of intensity. The stages of consciousness are one way to describe the process of spiritual evolution. This is the experiential conviction of God as a Presence of extraordinary tenderness and exquisite thoughtfulness, beyond any human conception or expectation. Perhaps the infinite gratuity of God’s unconditional love, beyond all love as we know it, is the best way to express it. In any case, there is no end to divine love. As the Psalmist cries out, “His love is everlasting” (Psalm 135). — From CO Newsletter, June 2019 LETTING GOD ACT According to quantum physics, various levels of material energy can occupy the same physical space at the same time. In similar fashion, the divine energy can be at work in us at levels that cannot be perceived at all. On the level of grace, faith is purified of attachments and excessive dependency on ways that are good as stepping stones, but inadequate to manifest the full range of the divine presence and action. By sitting down to do Centering Prayer we consent to the divine presence, the whole of God in pure faith. This faith, once it is established as a conviction, changes our perspective of who we are and who God is. It operates appropriately through the theological virtues and the Seven Gifts of the Spirit, enabling us to respond to the realities and routines of daily life and to perceive the divine presence in the ordinary, the insignificant, and even in suffering. — Thomas Keating, “Intimacy with God”