Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction
Vaclav Havel
Self-transcendence is the movement from within to beyond ourselves. It is reaching out – towards the other, to all living things. It is the deeply felt and joyous need to be in harmony with what we ourselves are not….because it is the expression and affirmation of the deep inter-connectedness, the “hidden wholeness” we have with each other.
The way forward is the way to someone else.
John V. Taylor
Image: Image from Light the Well, Anna Sikorska
Jesus is the self-communication of God to the universe, and at the same time the self-transcendence of the universe to God (Karl Rahner). Jesus is both God’s unconditional love for all creation and creation’s unconditional response to that love. In Jesus we hear God’s YES to humanity and all of creation, and creation’s humanity’s YES to God. In Jesus we see both gift and response. He is our future who has already appeared. As you think about these things, can you join you “yes” to Jesus’ YES?
God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the Trinity.
Rowan Williams
The Christian vision isn’t an optional extra, a particular way of being religious. It is offering us a universal way of being human. Jesus- the one true human being – shows us that we are Christologically and paschally structured.
We flourish when we give ourselves away.
How attractive is that?
Think about the little opportunities offered to you every day to create a space for another,
to let go of your opinions and ideas,
your need to fight back,
to be defensive or to stay as the victim –
and discover genuine and authentic community.
Jesus – who shows us something of how God looks at us – says to us that we matter, that we are good at heart, that we have an inherent and inalienable dignity. But there is a double dimension to this – for with this sense of value, dignity and inner beauty comes “the wound of self-knowledge”. But Jesus is the one who “comes to wound us and to heal the wound”. In him we see ourselves as we truly are.
From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord’s meaning. It was more than fifteen years after that I was answered in my spirit’s understanding. ‘You would know our Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will now and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else- ever!
So it was that I learned that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us; and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall. In this love all his works have been done, and in this love he has made everything serve us; and in this love our life is everlasting. Our beginning was when we were made, but the love in which he made us never had beginning. In it we have our beginning.
Julian of Norwich 86
The images in this post are from an installation at St Martin in the Fields in November 2017, created by artist, Anna Sikorska.
Anna Sikorska’s SALT installation was set in the Light Well of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, England during November and December 2017. It was the culmination of the Light the Well community art project in which individuals from across St Martin’s – church congregation, Chinese community, clergy, staff and members of the International Group – gathered together over time and tables of clay to carefully form the porcelain lanterns which filled the Light Well. Each porcelain lantern was filled with light from a simple string of lamps.
Conversations around the tables when making the lanterns touched on ‘cracked pots’, the continental tradition of ‘St Martin’s day’ paper lanterns, networks of sea buoys, St Paul describing light inside clay vessels, the fragility of our lives and bodies, ‘broken but not crushed’ and Leonard Cohen’s lines: ‘Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.’
Source: Light in Clay Jars, Jonathan Evens
And for a final piece of music of music for reflection in this series here is Carson Cooman’s Prayer of Julian of Norwich
For you are enough for me: Only in you do I have everything. Amen.
For a PDF of the text of this meditation please click the link below.
For a copy of Fr Philip Carter’s entire series, Becoming a Human Being, please click the link below.
