Session Two
The Blessed Community
“When we are drowned in the overwhelming seas of the love of God, we find ourselves in a new and particular relation to a few of our fellows.”
Kelly’s point in this essay is straightforward: when one discovers and is discovered by one’s Center, where God and the soul are one in love, one’s circle of friends will change. There is a “new alignment of our personal relations.”
There are not many people in the human community whose center is grounded in the Center of Divine Love which is our source and our sustenance, thus when we find such people the orbit of our community shifts to include them. “Our friendships become realigned.”
In this realignment we also see people who we formerly admired in a new light. The successful, busy people in leadership positions in the various institutions of our community are seen as operating with good intentions but not as people grounded in the deep peace which surpasses all understanding. They are simply busy.This does not make them bad. Far from it! It is just that in the light of eternal love that is our only hunger now we can see that they are not moving at the depth to which we long to be taken by God who alone can whisk into the secret, silent, spacious landscape of His own heart.
If we don’t choose depth, but instead operate wholly at the surface level of life the sacred word “Fellowship becomes identified with a purely horizontal relation of person to person, not with the horizontal-vertical relationship of person to person in God.”
The Blessed Community is the contemplative church. A collection of people who are nearly “a little church within the church” who find their grounding completely in God who is the ground of every soul. In God, who is their Divine Center, they find everything they have ever looked for and thus they sell out in full surrender to mysterious immediacy they feel pulsing within them convinced that this unseen, inscrutable presence which quickens the very blood in their veins is the great I AM. This ground they have discovered within themselves is not a private possession captured by people like a long coveted secret. Quite the opposite, it is the very thing that all humans (indeed all life) has in common.
The “danger” is that once you see it, feel it, are overtaken by it…you can’t go back to living your life solely on the surface. It will become harder and harder to hate your neighbor even those who most adamantly and actively oppose you. They will, as Teresa says, become your secret friends as your ever-expanding heart houses them in exquisite, unexplainable tenderness and love.
There is a significant reorientation to one’s life as love converts the soul. One goes back to scripture and the many facets and tools of the tradition and sees all in a new light, the light of the love that is one’s ground and source. The mystical is tucked away in all and the light of God-presence breaks through all to be met by eyes that can see. The soul leaps respectfully over the creed not wishing to do away with it to discover the Divine seed that gave birth to all the words and creedal constructs that we’ve wrapped around the ineffable. The longing for those members of the Blessed Community is for the nakedness of God and an unmediated consummation of one’s relationship with the Source of all.
In the Blessed Community, the Fellowship of people who are irrevocably “drowned in the overwhelming seas of the love of God,” contact is not always constant between the members. It doesn’t have to be, in fact, words increasingly carry less meaning anyway. As the Blessed Community “nears completeness, words no longer help, but hinder, and the final pooling of joy and love in Him is accomplished in the silences of the Eternal.”
“All personal relations which lie only in time are open-ended and unfinished.”
Don’t mistake the Blessed Community for an exclusive, closed club. It is decidedly not, in fact, quite the opposite: the community is not complete and will never be complete until all people are grounded in the love of which they are constructed. So we love all people that all people might be overtaken, drowned, in the love that will finally save us.
The Eternal Now and Social Concern
Eternity (timelessness) and time (the clock-bound dimension of the greater whole) in which we live are one, but we must speak of them as two because of the limits of linearity and words.
The worth of any religious endeavor, system, or fellowship is commonly judged by the effect it has on time bound social concerns.
It has also been common among religious people and institutions to instruct suffering, hungry people to long for heaven and heaven’s rewards instead of pining away for earthly consolations.
Both ways of approaching and judging the one life which exists in time and eternity are misguided. We should, says Kelly, neither forsake this world in time for the eternal habitations, nor abandon thoughts of God and eternity resting the entirety of our concern and focus on life in the time-bound dimension.
An appropriate corrective to the one-sided bias whether for Eternity or “time-preoccupation” is the mystic sense that the “Eternal is the creative root of time itself.” Here-in-time does matter a great deal and is held in and sourced by the Eternal from which all creation in time flows forth continuously.
In truth, “we live our lives at two levels simultaneously, the level of time and the level of the Timeless.”
“The ordinary [person], busy making a living” often lives in the past reviewing trends, successes and mistakes or in the future predicting what will happen and forsakes the now as “an incidental dividing point” between the past and the future.
“The experience of the Divine Presence changes all this familiar picture.”
When one experiences the Presence of God unmediated the Now is not a mere dividing point between past and future, rather it is the throne-room of the Divine who is infinitely present in the present.
“The Now contains all that is needed for the absolute satisfaction of our deepest cravings.”
Time is the gifted frame in which we live. The “mother” of time, “our Holy Now,” is the timeless Eternal manifesting as time-bound creation.
It is God who is the primary worker in the world, not us. We live in the illusion that time is our domain and we are lords of the now. Not so. Our task is to “be still and know” assuming an inner posture of vulnerability to being overtaken by the Divine Presence and then swept up in the enjoyable flow of the Eternal into the Now.
“Joy unspeakable” is “to surrender self-confidence and self-centered effort, that is, self-originated effort, and let the Eternal (God) be the dynamic guide in recreating, through us, our time-world. This is the first fruit of the Spirit. “The second is love.”
“In the Eternal Now all people become seen in a new way.” We grow to love and care for them all.
“The invading Love of the Eternal Now must break in through us into this time-now.”
The whole point of the journey is the one and all would discover and be discovered by the Eternal and loved as if he/she were the prodigal, the longed for object of God’s deepest affection.
The Blessed Community is not founded upon and sustained by a common subjective experience. It is “founded upon a common Object (God), who is known by them all to be the very Life within them.”
Individualism with all its striving for success and anxiety about failing, with its preoccupation with the past and the future dissolves when touched by the Grace that radiates from the Eternal Now in the Divine Presence. This is the peace that surpasses understanding.
God’s love is unhurried. This is peace.
“There is more to the experience of God than that of being plucked out of the world.”
“There is a tendering of the soul, toward everything in creation, from the sparrow’s fall to the slave under the lash.”
“God’s love isn’t just a diffused benevolence. As the Eternal is the root and ground of all times, yet breaks into particular moments, so the Infinite Love is the ground of all creatures, the source of their existence, and also knows a tender concern for each, and guides those who are sensitive to this care into a mutually supportive Blessed [Community.]
We don’t have to do it all. We are not the saviours of the world and the people in it. Rather, ours is to listen for the calling to do our particular tasks which are “our share in the joyous burdens of love.”
“We cannot die on every cross, nor are we expected to.”
“Life becomes simplified when dominated by faithfulness to a few concerns.”
“Too many of us have too many irons in the fire.”
We should say, Yes, only when prompted by Inner Guidance. We should say, No, when it seems simply that we can do the task or that we can’t turn down a friend.
The Eternal is at work in time. What part is God calling you to play? Be assured it is one part, not all the parts.