The Christ and the Indwelling
What of joining? What of union? What of twoness and dialogue?
What of coming together? Coming together in Christ? ~ Jesus
Shortly after my last 2006 entry, I took a retreat. During it, I had what I called a “Christ to me,” experience. Because of it, I began to go slowly through The Dialogues as I felt into what this idea of “Christ to me,” had to say. I found this writing in my record of that time. I am talking to Jesus, telling him:
I wrote some more on Creation of the New: the astounding idea of twoness. Then I was inside and read a little of Emily Carr and she’s talking of this place within her heart, where no one, no matter how intimate, gets to be, no one who hasn’t touched her spirit. I feel as if she says more in a paragraph sometimes than I with all my many pages.
Now back, I pretty much just opened The Dialogues to what I was looking for: (Days 27-29)
What we are speaking of now is being able to experience wholeness and the variability of experience that has come through the separated self of form. This is what you are beginning to do through your practice. Your proficiency will change your experience, and your experience will change the world.
Day 27.16
It’s about bringing forward the reality that already exists into the reality in which you exist, the experience of: “merging wholeness and separation.”
Day 29.6
What I feel happens is like this. There are days I feel that Fr. Adrian knows me and touches a knowing within me that rises, so that there is knowing and being known. That’s what happens with the “holy ones” who are “on” – whether they’re writing or speaking, whether it’s one-on-one or not. There’s a feeling of knowing and being known that goes beyond identification with the personal and is still absolutely personal, so that you know the person is talking “universal” truth, but you feel it as if it is meant for your ears only, in this sort of “private” way – maybe because it’s taken so far in – or it just has that ability to go really deep within you to that center where recognition takes place.
As Cletus (Fr. Cletus Wessels) says, “It isn’t a monologue it’s a dialogue.”
The absolute ultimate in human satisfaction, joy, is in the feeling that is a feeling of really living that comes of that joining – which is the dialogue rather than the monologue – the union rather than the separation – whether it is human to God or human to nature or man to dog or woman to cat or friend to friend. There’s just no getting around that. Without “two” there just isn’t that joining.
It is the joining rather than the oneness that is the cool thing, the alive thing. As if each little joining of parts is this lovely, lovely happening that is the essence of being alive. When you’re at work on joining the pieces of your psyche there might be this frustration. But when something clicks, falls into place, there is growth and movement and satisfaction. And then you go to work on the next piece and the next, and each piece that gets connected is an increase of LIFE in the movement to wholeness.
The dialogue is about people of Christ getting together to give spirit form – knowingly. That, you say, is the beginning from which increase and fruitfulness will spring. You practice there. You gain the ability there that becomes a way of being.
It seems as if the “making things happen” is more like making something of what happened already. At least for me. Something of significance happens and you don’t ignore that it’s happened or treat it as if it is a finite thing. Like…oh, that happened that day and it becomes nothing more than a memory. The day Mary Love “announced” the a “New course of Miracles” to me could have been like that if I hadn’t recognized it as an announcement that I was to heed.
I made something of it – by which I guess I mean that I let it influence me and my direction. If you don’t do that, wouldn’t it be like a person of your time saying – “Oh yes I met the great man. He was really something,” and then going on with their life unchanged? Isn’t the whole thing about a sacred event that it sends out ripples that change the world, even if you don’t know quite how?? Don’t you have to know, to recognize, that it affects you? Isn’t that the whole thing? You recognize that it is a call to you? A direction? An orientation? A way? A new way to be in the world? And then you ACT on it? It doesn’t just remain in your head or part of your inner life. It becomes manifest in the world.
I understand staying with immediacy. But if you don’t ever acknowledge that you’ve been re-routed, there’s never a significant change. If I hadn’t acknowledged my re-routing there’d be no course, then no solitude, no cabin, no dialogue, no “Christ to me” and however that’s going to keep showing up.
Anyway – because of Creation of the New, I suppose, I’m hung up on the mutual side of things. Mutual acknowledgment. Mutual recognition. Mutual acceptance of a shared experience. Mutual re-routing.
Like when Christie (Lord) accepted that we were in rebirth together. A few phone calls a week might not have seemed like any big deal but it was. We accepted being in a time of rebirthing “together.”
Leading back to the question: What does it mean to be joined in your name. What does it mean to be Christ to each other? What is the deal with the unnamed acceptance where things happen but there’s no agreement about what happened or what it means or where it is sending you? Do you have to be always and forever alone in your work for God?
It’s a mystery. It is a mystery why there is that preference, that chemistry—so that with one person it’s easy and with another you ride all the ups and downs and complain about them and yet stick with them and remember that they took you higher.
Jesus, you said to me once:
People are at different places in their lives, relating to “their” lives—and you are here, relating to “our” life when you are not too busy thinking about “their lives.”
This is what you see and what pains you. Everyone running around relating to their own lives. What of joining? What of union? What of twoness and dialogue? What of coming together? Coming together in Christ?
You felt hungry enough for that acknowledgement that you felt it in church. It was like a revelation – the most simple aspect of Christian life – gathering as people of Christ. Being Christ to each other. You are like Angie (my daughter) after sharing a life of Christ at camp, not wanting to let it slip away. Wanting to live within that continual acknowledgment.
Do you not have that here? Why else would you be here?
It is, in truth, twoness that has you a little disenchanted with this life we share and wishing for another with whom to share it. Another and another with whom it would grow. Sacred twoness. Sharing the Christ life one human person to another.
But you don’t want to give this up! You don’t want to live down at church or volunteer for activities! You don’t want any of your friends over all the time. You have more movement than you can handle now! And this is because “your” life is different. Christie has her life and her relating to do. Mary hers. Don (Turk) his. You yours. You want to get together a little, but not a lot. Why might this be?
So that you dwell.
So that you dwell with what comes to you. You have to be unafraid of this taking time, of this dwelling, with spending years knowing one “small” thing – for in the One known through and through is everything. Do not let twoness rush you.
Accept it when it comes. Dwell with what comes. Stay in peace.