Transcendent Unity
Many years ago, during a health crisis that kept me in the process of diagnosis for 6 months, I entered into an experience known as "a dark night of the soul." This experience is more common than I realized at the time because it is not often shared due to the fact that it involves an individual's personal spiritual journey. My doctor was a brilliant internist and, through our many hours together, I recognized he was also very spiritual. At my lowest point, when I asked him if I needed to be on a psych ward, he asked if I was willing to speak with a friend of his who was a Catholic priest. Without hesitation, I agreed. I was born into the Catholic faith and then became a Protestant and rather well-known Bible Teacher in my 30's. There was a reason I came to know and practice m faith in both "sides" of the Christian house. It prepared my heart and mind to receive truth on a deeper, wider level.
The Catholic priest I met with manifested such a depth of understanding, love, and compassion that I felt I was in the presence of someone who believed my story and the depths of grief that, for the first time in my life, I could not feel God's presence. He gently taught me about what I was experiencing, this Dark Night of the Soul. He also humbly asked if he could lay hands on me and pray. Even as I type this I am filled with emotion at what I felt that day in his office. It was as though he had known me all my life and that he had been with me during this challenging time. When he prayed for me, I felt the Hand of God, Divine Love bathe me in love and light. Then he asked If I would read a book he had found helpful in his journey. He handed me his copy and left me to read the Introduction. I handed the book back before I left with the promise to buy a copy, which I did on the way home.
My journey through the Dark Night was not quite over but I now knew that it would indeed end.
The book is titled THOMAS MERTON, The Hidden Ground of Love. It is a collection of Thomas Merton's letters. I have chosen a few quotes from that Introduction in hopes you will be blessed with a deeper desire to experience this Presence called "God" in many languages, religions, cultures. "Divine Love" is how I have come to think of this Presence. In truth I have never found an adequate way to describe who/what can only be known in experiences that transcend human understanding and yet are shared by seekers of many faiths. The following are quotes from this book:
His (Thomas Merton's) religious experience gave Merton the motivation for his ever deepening commitment to peace, justice, and human equality.
...Merton discovered God as the ground of his own being and in that same ground he found the rest of reality, especially his brothers and sisters, in a unity that was beyond all separateness.
...he writes of "the happiness of being one with everything in that hidden ground of love for which there can be no explanation."
These words which see God not as a being among other beings but as the ground of all beings, and even more precisely the ground of love in which all being find their identity and uniqueness...
(Above quotes on page IX)
May your mind and heart be open to the truth of your own soul, the light of your own being.
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