CAC teacher Jim Finley describes how God knows each of us intimately because we are “hidden with Christ in God”:
When God created you, God did not have to think up who you might be. God … eternally knows who you eternally are and are called to be from before the origins of the universe. As Saint Paul says, “Your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).
Who God the [Creator] eternally contemplates you to be in Christ the Word is who you are before you were ever born…. There was never a point prior to which God did not eternally know you in Christ the Word through whom all things are made. The infinite simplicity of God admits no division. In this poetic meditation on your true self before you were born is a meditation on you in God as God, in no way other or less than all that God is.
Our response to God’s love for us can result in our giving our lives back to God:
In creating you as a person, God the Father [or Mother] wills into being who [God] eternally knows you to be in Christ the Word. God’s … fiat [“let it be”] of creation … brings you into being, giving you a nature…. In your human nature you are a finite creature of God endowed with the capacity to know and to love. Why? So that you might, through your human nature, come to know God by learning to love God and to give yourself back to God, who is the origin, ground, and fulfillment of your life as a person created by God … through Christ the Word.
Finley reflects on how meditation may allow us to experience our oneness with God:
Moments of spontaneous meditative experience can be understood as flash points of awareness as the person we are breaks forth into human consciousness. Suddenly, we realize a oneness with God that we intuitively recognize to be at once God’s identity and our own. In moments of meditative awakening we obscurely sense that who we are and who God is is, in some inscrutable manner, one mystery. Sustained in this awareness, we realize that if we were to try to find ourselves as someone other than God, we would search in vain. If we were to search for God as other than ourselves, our search would be equally futile. For we realize that God is given to us, wholly and completely, in a oneness that is at once all that God is and all that we really are. We are not God. But we are not other than God, either. We as persons are who God eternally knows us to be in [God’s] infinite knowing of [God’s] infinite actuality. And in this paradoxical truth lies the essence of what it means to be a human being destined for eternal oneness with God.
Reference:
James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 185–187.
Image credit and inspiration: Susan Wilkinson, Untitled (detail), 2021, acrylic paint, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Just like the colors swirl together in this painting, we and God swirl in our dwelling/indwelling.
Story from Our Community:
The year I turned 70, we welcomed our first and only grandchild. As a novice woodcarver, I decided to start a new tradition and carve a Santa for him each Christmas. I design each Santa figure around the themes I see in his year—experiences, accomplishments, and moments shared. Then, I spend time carving, sanding and painting, all the while thinking of my precious gift. This year’s Santa is finished, wrapped, and under the tree. This tradition has transformed Advent into a wonderful time of anticipation, love, and giving.
—James M.
