Unítas Déi and Time
O Lover,
My periodic inclination to “play god” notwithstanding, I am a finite, a creature, one not self-generating, self-sustaining, or self-culminating. This means, among other things, that I am delimited, whether bedazzlingly or confiningly, by space and time (chrónos). It goes with the territory of creaturehood. As such, I tend to experience my sourcing (past), destiny (future), and the dancing moment betwixt (present) in terms of “before,” “after,” and “during.” While I might fleetingly fantasize myself outside this fetter, the moment passes and, as with gravity, I revert to the constant of chrónos.
Except when I do not. The tradition of the Christ, its primary roots in the Hebrew faith, holds that chrónos itself is creature, one via which You act rather than something to which You are subjected. In short, time too is of Your crafting. From our human side all of this, most dissonant and oxymoronic, is responded to in wildly different ways: some ignore the tension and presume to ligature You, whether in god-talk, theology, or devotions, in chrónos; others daringly seek to embrace the paradox (e.g., Tillich’s“eternal now”); yet others simply bail out and hoist some cold one.
I find myself in the second category, embracing both creaturely delimitation and Your freedom from such constraint. A helpful example might involve the term heílsgeschichte (“salvation history”). While from our side this reference to the unfolding of Your self-disclosure amidst and to the cosmos intimates process, sequence, and culmination (and thus chrónos), the tradition of the Christ teaches that the term in its largest sense declares the disposition of Your Sacred Heart regarding all having being, a disposition eternal, timeless, relentless, and the core of Reality. When I am in liturgy I seek to allow the images, texts, and words to familiarize me yet more with Your perspective unligatured by time.
Now then, on the mystical edge of the Christ tradition the télos of The Soul’s Journey into [You], the title of the major work of Bonaventure, OFM, is unítas Déi (“union with God”), albeit variously understood. The chrónos-ladenedness of his use of “journey” accurately connotes how we humans view the matter: a process completed for most “after”—perhaps “before” for the few—physical death. But what is unítas Déi in Your timeless Sacred Heart, O “Father of Lights with whom there is neither variableness nor shifting shadow” (James 1:17)? Does not the term point toward Your Unconditional Love, toward how You are timelessly disposed toward the recipients of Your gift of being? When viewed as grounded in who we know You to be principally in Your Christ, Your very identity, has it ever been otherwise? Can it ever be otherwise with You for whom “past,” “present,” and “future” delimitations do not pertain?
Insofar as the unítas indistinctiónis mystics, including the Beguines, Rhineland Dominicans, and Juan de la Cruz of the 13th-16th centuries, appear to be on to something with their repeated flirtation with theósis, deification, and engoddedness, do I not find myself being increasingly drawn into Your heart, the timeless fount of Unconditional Love? What we of the chrónos-bound experience as duration, development, and Your Self-disclosure You have never not held securely far beyond the reach of flux and forfeiture.
Indeed, I am suspecting that I have never been outside that safety, nor shall I ever be.The spiritual treks of us finites, experienced as chrónos journeys toward You, are in reality ever within You and moving toward greater awareness of our common deified destiny. I am inexorably being shown a convergence in which advaíta (“neither two nor one”), Your Eternal Now, unítas indistinctiónis, and deification are but sundry surfaces of a single Mystérium which/who is You.
To conclude, the query of Abhishiktananda/Fr.Henri le Saux, OSB (1910-73) directed to Murray Rogers, my first spiritual director, is also my own: “Murray, is there anything but God?”
