Your Love Is Revealed

And, because the Church doesn’t often talk about personal spiritual experience, we may not even recognise it when it happens. Spiritual experience is very ordinary, not extra-ordinary. It is not normally an out-of-this-world experience of bliss but a growing realisation of who we really are at the deepest level of our being. It occurs in fleeting glimpses, moments of insight when we briefly experience our true-self and we apprehend something of the depth of reality.

Much of what is called religious education is in fact religious instruction – teaching about the beliefs, doctrines, rituals, customs, rites, and roles of a particular religion. And, there is, of course a need for that. But there is also a need to help people to explore their innate spirituality through practices that promote personal spiritual experience. The theologian Michael Paul Gallagher expressed this need as follows: ‘Spirituality comes before theology: If faith is not an experience of encounter, we have little to reflect on except the words of others. And they will ring hollow unless touched by personal fire. ‘

As John Main describes it, through meditation the ultimate secret is revealed and ‘the secret is this – Christ in you.’ In meditation ‘we are not striving to make something happen. It has already happened. We are simply realising what already is, by travelling deeper into the unified consciousness of Jesus, into the wonder of our own creation.’

It may help to think about spirit as the flame on a candle. Have you ever tried to walk while holding a candle? If you have you will realise that the movement often snuffs out the candle, because when we move too quickly, the candle experiences the sudden movement through the air in the same way someone deliberately blowing out the candle, as we often do with candles on a birthday cake. So to keep the candle lit, we need to protect it with our hand, or better yet, we can choose to be very still. That is not a bad way of appreciating the need for stillness in meditation.

Imagine that when we create the space within where our spirit can be still and receptive to the Holy Spirit; if you think of both spirits as candles, what happens in meditation is like the flame of the candle that is the Holy Spirit lights up our own candle. That metaphor helps us to understand how we become energised by grace through meditation. When one candle lights another, the first does not lose its energy but now, suddenly, one experiences double the brightness and double the energy burning within.

Love is like that. The more love is poured out, the more it replenishes itself.  It’s like dropping a stone in a still pond. The ripples grow outward, extending in all directions. When we experience this love in meditation, it reawakens and reignites our spirit so that it burns more brightly, shines more clearly.

The image of an unending candle burning within us also shows how we are intimately linked with the Divine. Once a candle is lit, its flame becomes just like that of the candle which lit it. Ultimately, there is nothing to distinguish the essence of one flame from the other.

When we say ‘Your love is revealed’ we mean not just that we encounter God in meditation – even if at a level of consciousness deeper than ordinary self-consciousness – but we come to apprehend that not only is God mysteriously in us but we are also mysteriously in God. We come to understand that our longing for love has been awakened by Love, who loved us first. This discovery, this revelation, often comes to us as a slow apprehension rather than a dramatic unveiling.

This is the good news of the Gospels. When we come to appreciate the truth that the Spirit dwells within us, we are no longer motivated by any outside reward or punishment but by our participation in the Mystery itself. Because we participate in the Love that is revealed, carrots and sticks are no longer required or helpful. As St Paul says in Philippians 2:13 “It is God, who for God’s own loving purpose, puts both the will and the action into you”.  We no longer engage in mere rule-following behaviour; rather, it is our awareness of our actual identity in God that drives and transforms us. When we truly apprehend who we are at the deepest level of our being, we do things because they are true and loving, not because we have to do them or fear the consequences of not doing them. Now we are not so much driven from without,  by the false-self, by our desire for power, prestige and possessions but we are drawn from within, by the True-Self.

And we also come to appreciate that what has been disclosed, uncovered, revealed is true, not just for me, but for all of creation. Although each of us is a unique manifestation of the Love of God, ultimately we are all one. As John Main wrote: ‘Unity among Christians as well as, in the long term, unity among different races and creeds, rests upon our finding the inner principle of unity as a personal experience within our own hearts.’ While the experience may be personal what it reveals is universal because the nature of the experience, as the Spirit prays within us, is that it takes us beyond our egoic selves into full awareness of our common personhood.

Of course, as St John of the Cross attested, there are times in our spiritual experience where it seems that love is withheld rather than revealed; when meditation and prayer are experienced as dull, turgid and dry and we sense an absence of love instead. At such times, when we may experience a dark night of the senses or a dark night of the soul, we need to trust in our faith, accept that Love is still at work in us at an even deeper level, albeit behind a cloud of unknowing, and persist with our daily practice as lovingly as we can.

I invite you now to spend some time in the stillness and silence of meditation where you can begin to experience that truth for yourself.