Divine Indwelling

Gregg’s Reflection

In four decades of sitting in pews most every week and listening to sermons, I’ve never heard a sermon on Divine Indwelling, also called Immanence. This is one of the longest posts I’ve published, because I find it so important. I was in my 60’s before I came to believe there was a divine spark within me.

Much of the preaching I’ve heard made it sound like the story started with Genesis 3, the fall. I could believe I was flawed, that I was broken, that I was not good enough. Divine Spark? No way. I was just glad the Holy Spirit could use me as a broken person. The gradual dawning of the idea that I was made in the image of God, and had a spark of the divine within, brought me great relief, and some measure of joy.

In a Living School Symposium, I got the chance to ask Richard Rohr a question. “Why have I never heard a sermon on Divine Indwelling or Theosis?” These were frequent topics of our reading. “I’m not surprised,” Father Richard replied, “Theosis was lost to the West for 1000 years. They never lost it in the Eastern Orthodox tradition.”

So, wade into this treasure. Savor it. Linger to reflect on it over time. Chew on it until you can digest the idea.

Journaling Prompts

How would your outlook on life change if you truly believed there was a spark of God deeply within? How hard is it for you to believe you are the beloved of God? Ever heard a sermon on Diving Indwellin? If, not, ask your pastor why.

Celtic Tree of Life

Scripture

God, you were here all along, and I never knew it.

Genesis 28:16

God is my counselor, and at night my innermost being instructs me.

Psalm 16:7

Indeed, you delight in truth deep within me, and would have me know wisdom deep within.

Psalm 51:6

I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with those who are contrite and humble in spirit.

Isaiah 57:15

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you.

Ezekiel 36: 26-28

The kingdom of God is within you.

Luke 17:21

Do you not believe that I am in the father and the father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the father and the father is in me.

John 14:10-11

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another comforter and helper to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. You know this Spirit, for it abides with you and will be in you.

John 14:16-17

In Acts, we discover God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, inhabiting his people and empowering them to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom. The transformation of the Disciples is as dramatic as it is sudden. God himself is inhabiting and living in them, giving them power to proclaim fearlessly the message of Jesus' resurrection to everyone they meet.

RENOVARE Bible notes on Acts NT p. 192-193

In Him we live and move and have our being.

Acts 17:2

But you are not in the flesh you are in the Spirit since the Spirit of God dwells within you.

Romans 5-6, 9.

He who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.

Romans 8:11-13

We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God’s Spirit has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given. Romans 5:36

Do you not know that you are God‘s temple and that God‘s Spirit dwells in you?

1 Corinthians 3:16

Anyone united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him.

1 Corinthians 6:17

“I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And you shall be my sons and my daughters,” says the Lord Almighty.

2 Corinthians 6:16-18

Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?

2 Corinthians 13:5

God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child, then also an heir, through God.

Galatians 4:6-7

It is Christ who is growing in us, rather than we who are growing in Christ. Christ is formed in us by the power of the Holy Spirit as we respond to his ever-present Grace in our lives. This occurs in daily, ordinary life as we “practice the presence of God” (as Brother Lawrence taught us in his book of the same name) in our work, our play, our relationships and all of life. Steadily, gradually, Christ looms larger and larger within us. We find ourselves thinking, feeling, believing, serving, and living more like him.  Spiritual formation is being formed by the Spirit into the image of Christ. It is the Spirit's work, in the Spirit's way, and in the Spirit's time. The Spirit keeps us free and fruitful. When we draw your life and strength from the Spirit, we are free from the sinful desires that arise from him and weakness (5:16). When we are led by the Spirit we are free from the need to earn and perform (5:18) we are even freed from trying to be virtuous by the guarantee of fruitfulness (5:22)

RENOVARE Bible notes on Galatians, NT p. 324-325

You are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

Ephesians 2:22

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

Ephesians 3:16

Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power.

Ephesians 6:10

May the mind that is in Christ Jesus also be in you.

Philippians 2:5

The mystery of Christ is within you-your hope and glory!

Colossians 1:27

God yearns jealously for the spirit he has made to dwell in us.

James 4:5

See the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with him.

Revelations 21:3

Simply being safe, free from persecution, is not enough for God-lovers. They must have God himself dwelling in them if the deepest hunger of the human heart is to be satisfied.

RENOVARE Bible notes on Revelations 21:3

Ancient Writings

In each human soul there exists a divine element, a kind of inner eye capable of glimpsing something of God, for there exists a deep relationship, an affinity between human and divine nature.

Gregory of Nyssa, Ursula King, Christian Mystics: Their Lives and Legacies throughout the Ages, p. 48.

Look at the animals roaming the forest: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the birds flying across the sky: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the tiny insects crawling in the grass: God’s spirit dwells within them. . . . Look too at the great trees of the forest; look at the wild flowers and the grass in the fields; look even at your crops. God’s spirit is present within all plants as well. The presence of God’s spirit in all living things is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God’s eyes, nothing on the earth is ugly.

The Letters of Pelagius: Celtic Soul Friend, ed. Robert Van de Weyer, p.36.

We awaken in Christ's body as Christ awakens our bodies, and my poor hand is Christ. He enters my foot, and is infinitely me. I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him (for God is indivisibly whole, seamless in his Godhood). I move my foot, and at once he appears like a flash of lightning. Do my words seem blasphemous? — Then open your heart to Him and let yourself receive the one who is opening to you so deeply. For if we genuinely love Him, we wake up inside Christ's body where all our body, all over every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as Him, and He makes us utterly real, and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in His light. We awaken as the Beloved in every part of our body. 

Symeon the New Theologian 

Eagerly enter into the treasure house that is within you and you will see the things that are in heaven.

St. Isaac the Syrian

Divinity is the enfolding and unfolding of everything that is.  Divinity is in all things in such a way that all things are in divinity. 

Nicholas of Cusa

How could I know that he was present? As soon as he came within he roused my sleeping soul to instant wakefulness. He moved and mollified and wounded my heart, since it was hard as a rock and desperately ill. And then he began to root up and to destroy, to build up and to plant, to water what was parched, to enlighten what was dark (Jer 1:10), to set free what was chained up, to set on fire what was cold, as well as to set the crooked ways straight and the rough ways plain (Is 40:4), so that my soul might bless the Lord, and all that is in me might bless his holy name (Ps 102:1). It was only from the motion of my heart that I understood He was present.

Bernard of Clairvaux, Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, Bernard McGinn p. 223

God said to Mechtilde, “I who am Divine am truly in you. I can never be sundered from you; however far we may be parted, never can we be separated. I am in you and you are in Me. We could not be any closer. We two are fused into one, poured into a single mold; thus unwearied, we shall remain forever.”

Mechthilde of Magdeburg, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 65

“The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God, and God in all things,” Mechthilde of Magdeburg 1212-1282. Mechtild is speaking of her own evolution, her own spiritual growth. She was asleep, unawake, unaware until the day she woke up and underwent a spiritual awakening. And the test of her awakening? Panentheism: a deep awareness and a sure awareness--”I saw and knew I saw”--that all things are in God and God is in all things. Is this the meaning of enlightenment? Meister Eckhart calls this breakthrough the realizations that “I and God are one.”

Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 66

Christ, as a human being, shares with all creatures; indeed he possesses being with rocks, lives among the plants, senses with animals, and understands with angels.

Bonaventure, Sermon for the first Sunday of Lent, The Works of St Bonaventure

Grace flows from within not from without, for God is more interior to us than we are to ourselves.

Blessed Jan von Ruusbroec, The Spiritual, Espousals, p. 75

Christ has something in common with all creatures. With the stone he shares existence, with the plants he shares life, with the animals he shares sensation, and with the angels he shares intelligence. Thus all things are transformed in Christ since in the fullness of his nature he embraces some part of every creature.

Bonaventure, “Sermon I for the Second Sunday of Lent,” trans. Zachary Hayes

Each creature’s beauty is a witness to the divine wisdom...Every creature participates in some way in the likeness of the Divine Essence....The Incarnation accomplished the following: That God became human and that humans became God and sharers in the divine nature. 

Thomas Aquinas

God is in all things as giving them being, power and operation. One can say that God is more closely united to each thing than the thing is to itself.

Thomas Aquinas, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 101

There is in the soul a something in which God dwells, and there is in the soul a something in which the soul dwells in God.

Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart's Creation Spirituality, p. 126

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar— I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.

Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, p. 14

When I Was the Forest. When I was the stream, when I was the forest, when I was still the field, when I was every hoof, foot, fin and wing, when I was the sky itself, no one ever asked me did I have a purpose, no one ever wondered was there anything I might need, for there was nothing I could not love. It was when I left all we once were that the agony began, the fear and questions came, and I wept, I wept. And tears I had never known before. So I returned to the river, I returned to the mountains. I asked for their hand in marriage again, I begged—I begged to wed every object and creature, and when they accepted, God was ever present in my arms. And He did not say, “Where have you been?” For then I knew my soul—every soul—has always been held by Him. 

Meister Eckhart

I am certain, as certain as that I live, that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself. 

Meister Eckhart Sermon II

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, p. 179

Greatly ought we to rejoice that God dwells in our soul; and more greatly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is created to be God's dwelling place, and the dwelling of our soul is God.

Julian of Norwich

God is within us, at home, patiently and kindly awaiting our recognition. As Maker of all, God is in everything, present in all places and at all times.

Julian of Norwich, Selections from Revelations of Divine Love—Annotated & Explained, annotation by Mary C. Earle, p. 116.

God is in everything that is good and the goodness that everything possesses is God.

Julian of Norwich, Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 34

We are in God, and God whom we do not see is in us.

Julian of Norwich, Doyle, Meditations with Julian, p. 89

Our soul is oned to God, unchangeable goodness, and therefore between God and our soul there is neither wrath or forgiveness because there is no in between.

Julian of Norwich, Doyle, Meditations with Julian, p. 77

God is nearer to us than our own soul.

Julian of Norwich, Doyle, Meditations with Julian, p. 95

The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.

Julian of Norwich, Complete Julian p. 171

Beautifully he sits, peacefully and restfully, in the soul, his most familiar home and endless dwelling.

Julian of Norwich, Doyle,  Meditations with Julian of Norwich p. 114

God is within us, at home, patiently and kindly awaiting our recognition. As Maker of all, God is in everything, present in all places and at all times.

Julian of Norwich: Selections from Revelations of Divine Love—Annotated & Explained, annotation by Mary C. Earle, p. 116.

Give me the grace to recollect myself in the little heaven of my soul where You have established Your dwelling. There You let me find You, there I feel that You are closer to me than anywhere else, and there You prepare my soul quickly to enter into intimacy with You … Help me O Lord, to withdraw my senses from exterior things, make them docile to the commands of my will, so that when I want to converse with You, they will retire at once, like bees shutting themselves up in the hive in order to make honey.

St. Teresa of Ávila

We need no wings to go in search of him, but have only to look upon him present within us. You find God in yourself and yourself in God. 

St. Teresa of Ávila

If you wish to find Me / In yourself seek Me.

Teresa of Ávila, Seeking God, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Ávila, vol. 3

The divine will is a deep abyss of which the present moment is the entrance. If you plunge into this abyss you will find it infinitely more vast than your desires.

Jean Pierre de Caussade

Our highest and best treasure, the kingdom of God, is not something exterior, but is an indwelling good that we always have with us, hidden from the whole world. For it, we need no great skill, speech, or many books, but rather a heart released and surrendered to God. For this purpose let us diligently turn within to this inner, hidden, heavenly, and eternal goodness and kingdom. In our hearts and souls is the true school of the Holy Spirit, the true workshop of the Holy Trinity, the true temple of God.

Lutheran mystic Johann Arndt, Bernard McGuinn, Essential Writings of Christian Mystics, p. 278

He is your soul, and your soul is He.

St Elizabeth of the Trinity, Heaven in Faith, Vol 1, p. 96

In the infinity of night skies, in the free flashing of lightning, in whirling elemental winds, you are God. In the impenetrable mists of dark clouds, in the wild gusts of lashing rain, in the ageless rocks of the sea, you are God and I bless you. You are in all things and contained by no thing. You are life of all life and beyond any name. You are the eternal mystery and I praise you. 

Celtic Benediction

Applying my mind to these thoughts in the morning, and then spending the rest of the day, even in the midst of all my work, in the presence of God, I considered that he was always with me, that he was even within me.

Brother Lawrence, Practicing the Presence of God 

The presence of God which sanctifies us is the indwelling of the blessed Trinity, who take up their abode in the depths of our hearts when we submit to the divine will. Contemplation ranks first (among spiritual disciplines) because it is the greatest means of uniting ourselves to God when the Divine Will bids us to make use of it.

Jean-Pierre of Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, p. 40. Christian Mystics, p, 180

“My deepest me is God.” St. Catherine of Genoa. God is both utterly beyond me and yet totally within me at the same time.

Rohr, Yes, and, p. 48

God became the bearer of flesh for a time in order that humanity might become the bearer of Spirit forever.

St. Athanasius, Roots of Christian Mysticism, p. 263

Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continually return. Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. Yielding to these persuasions, gladly committing ourselves in body and soul, utterly and completely, to the Light Within, is the beginning of true life. It is a dynamic center, a creative Life that presses to birth within us. It is a Light Within that illumines the face of God and casts new shadows and new glories upon the human face. It is a seed stirring to life if we do not choke it. It is the Shekinah of the soul, the Presence in the midst. Here is the Slumbering Christ, stirring to be awakened, to become the soul we clothe in earthly form and action. And [Christ] is within us all.

Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion p. 9–10, 11.

Keep within. And when they say, ‘Look here or look there is Christ’, go not forth, for Christ is within you. And those who try to draw your minds away from the teaching inside you, are opposed to Christ. For the measure’s within, and the light of God is within, and the pearl is within, though hidden.

George Fox, Epistle 19 (1652), Works (1831), Vol. 7, p. 27. 

Modern Writings

He comes in the form of the beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbor..

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I know from experience that the kingdom of God is within you. Jesus has no need of books or teachers to instruct souls. He teaches me without the noise of words, Never have I heard him speak, but I feel He is within me at each moment; He is guiding and inspiring me with what I must say and do.

Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 179

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.

Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Dag Hammarskjöld, former Secretary-General of the UN

The deeper I descend into myself, the more I find God at the heart of my being.

Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in the Time of War, p. 61.

As incarnations of the Son of God, we allow God to experience what it is like to be human in each one of us.”

Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable

Perhaps once we can see God in plants and animals, we might learn to see God in our neighbors. And then we might learn to love the world. And then, when all of that loving has taken place, when all of that seeing has happened, when such people come to me and tell me they love Jesus, I’ll believe it! They’re capable of loving Jesus. The soul is prepared. The soul is freed, and it’s learned how to see and how to receive and how to move in and how to move out from itself. Such individuals might well understand how to love God.

Richard Rohr, “Christianity and the Creation: A Franciscan Speaks to Franciscans,” in Embracing Earth: Catholic Approaches to Ecology, p. 130–131.

Jesus had a fundamental vision—faith that all people are “children of God. He taught that each person has an uncreated soul that is actually a continuation of the Divine Life itself. When he met a person, therefore, he really believed that God was somehow present in that person, so he looked for that presence through all the overlying contradictions to it, until he found it. Then he addressed himself to that point in the person. When anyone does that, it tends to awaken the divine in the other, who is thus invited to speak from that place in return.

Beatrice Bruteau, Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 5/6/20

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God. This little point of nothingness is the pure glory of God in us. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions points of light coming together in the face and blaze of the sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 140

He came to be a man like ourselves and, in His own Person, to unite man to God. As a result of this union of God and Man in the one Person of Christ it was possible for every man to be united to God in his own person, as a true son of God, not by nature but by adoption.

Thomas Merton, Inner Experience, p. 38

We are each a God-carrier, a tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, indwelt by God the holy and most blessed Trinity. To treat one such as less than this is not just wrong. It is as if we were to spit in the face of God.

Desmond Tutu

When we open the door and go inside, God is there in the temple of our soul, in the ashram of our heart, in the cathedral of our being. Which is not to dismiss the reality of this same loving presence being fully alive in our external world. The Holy One is with us in all of life. Our purpose for opening the door inward is to help us know and claim who we are so we can more completely join with God in expressing this love in every part of our external world.

Joyce Rupp, Open the Door: A Journey to the True Self, p. 4, 5.

To pray is to open up oneself to God who dwells within us.

Ilia Delio, Ten Evenings with God, p. 17

What was personified in the body of Jesus was a manifestation of this one universal truth: matter is, and has always been, the hiding place for Spirit, forever offering itself to be discovered anew. Francis of Assisi and his female companion, Clare, somehow knew that the beyond was not really beyond, but in the depths of here.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devo 12/21/20

The thought that Grace comes from outside ourselves can only be held in a dualistic mind.

Cynthia Bourgeault

We don’t see the light; rather, we are the aperture through which it shines.

Gabriel Marcel, James Finley, The Healing Path, p. 26

No matter what anyone has done to us in the past, or is doing to us now, or might do to us in the future, this innermost, hidden center of ourselves remains invincibly established in God as a mysterious Presence, as a life that is at once God’s and our own. It is in being awakened to this innermost center of ourselves with God that we find the courage to continue on in the challenging process of healing, grounded in a peace that is not dependent on the outcome of our efforts because it is the peace of God, which depends on nothing and on which everything depends.

James Finley, “The Spiritual Dimensions of Healing during Traumatizing Times,” “Trauma,” Oneing, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 94.

May each of us be so fortunate as to be overtaken by God in the midst of little things. May we each be so blessed as to be finished off by God, swooping down from above our illusion of separateness that perpetuates our fears. May we, in having our illusory, separate self slain by God, be born into a new and true awareness, seeing in each and every little thing we see, the fullness of God’s presence in our lives.

James Finley, Living School Teaching

In the soul, there is “something like a spark of divine nature, a divine light, a ray, an imprinted picture of the divine nature.” Meister Eckhart . . . But we have to make contact with this divine spark by emptying ourselves or letting go. And then we will know the unity that already exists.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devo 8/7/20

Life’s real and highest goal is to discover this spark of the divine that is in our hearts. When we realize this goal, we discover simultaneously that the divinity within ourselves is one and the same in all—all individuals, all creatures, all of life.

Easwaran, Original Goodness: A Commentary on the Beatitudes, p. 9.

Franciscan mysticism has an incarnational worldview, which is the profound recognition of the presence of the divine in literally “every thing” and “every one.”

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devo, 5/20/20

To span the infinite gap between the Divine and the human, God’s agenda is to plant a little bit of God, the Holy Spirit, right inside us.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 140

The spiritual life is nothing more or less than to allow that space to exist where God can dwell, to create the space where his glory can manifest itself. In your meditation you can ask yourself, ‘Where is the glory of God? If the glory of God is not there where I am, where else can it be?’ "

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devo, 5/10/20

Spirit is forever captured in matter, and matter is the place where Spirit shows itself.

Richard Rohr, Eager to Love, p. 214

Jesus was the guarantee that divinity can indeed reside within humanity, which is always our great doubt and denial.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devo, 12/25/19

It is God within us that loves God, so seek joy in God and peace within; seek to rest in the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is the only resting place that also allows us to bear the darkness. True joy is harder to access and even harder to hold onto than anger or fear. If our soul is at rest in the comforting sweetness and softness of God, we can bear the hardness of life and see through failure. If our truth does not set us free, it is not truth at all. If God cannot be rested in, God must not be much of a God. If God is not joy, then what has created the sunrise and sunset?

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devo, 4/6/20

Catholics tend to put their trust in the hierarchy. Protestants look to the Bible as final authority. Both are fonts of truth to be respected profoundly, but are one step removed from the inner testimony of the Spirit. The whole meaning of the New Covenant first promised by Jeremiah and fully claimed by Jesus was that the law would no longer be external but would be written on the heart (Jer 31: 31-34). It is the Holy Spirit “poured into our hearts” (Rom 5:5) who confers upon people healthy and solid inner authority, and this authority is based on the experience of God’s love.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 90

Father, help us to not worship the law, but to worship you who through your Spirit writes the law of love upon our hearts.

Richard Foster 

Jesus’ power rests on his ability to awaken that which lies at the core of my own being. There is something deep and pristinely clear in each of us that has the capacity to recognize wisdom when we meet it, and it is the nature of wisdom teaching to call this something forth. Until that spark of recognition goes off, wisdom remains invisible.

Cynthia Bourgeault Wisdom Way of Knowing, p.14

God sleeps in the rocks, dreams in the plants, is awake in animals and knows He is awake in humans.

Harvey Cheatham, friend in pursuit of esoteric spiritual truth

The source of our being lies in our innermost center, buried under the emotional debris of a lifetime.

Thomas Keating.

His presence is present in my own presence. If I am, then He is. And in knowing I am, if I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the undefinable “am” that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center I pass into the infinite “I am” which is the very Name of the Almighty.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, p. 70

Our existence, though truly our own, is to He Who Is as the waves to the sea, as the light to the flame. Our prayer becomes our basking in this light, our being quietly warmed by it, our being consumed by it. Our prayer becomes a silent sinking in the sea of being that is at once God and ourselves.

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. 107

The gift is already within, yet it has to be desired and awakened by the person. But you never know it’s within until after it is awakened.

Richard Rohr, Naked Now, p. 22

If God’s Spirit has truly joined our spirit, then we have every reason to trust the deepest movements of our nature. This trust becomes a key for all spirituality. The goal of Christian spirituality is to recognize and respond to the continual inner movements of the Spirit, for the Spirit will always lead us towards greater union with Christ and greater love and service of God and others.

Richard Hauser

There is absolutely nothing you can do to earn or get the Holy Spirit; there is nothing at all you can do to attain the divine indwelling. Don’t try to believe in the “Holy Spirit” as one doctrine among others. Instead practice drawing from this deep well within you, then you will naturally believe. At the same time there’s nothing you can do to lose the Holy Spirit; the most you can do, as Ephesians clearly says, is to “grieve” the existing Presence that is sealed within you (4:30). You can, therefore, be ignorant of your birthright. You can neglect this gift, and thus not enjoy its wonderful fruits.

Richard Rohr, The Naked Now, p.21

Once you get in contact with the flow and the ultimate source within you, then your stability comes from the only stable source, God. We stop depending on something outside of us to fill our inner needs. We reverse the flow and draw what we need from inside, from the absolute union between God and our soul. We let God’s energy, God’s Spirit, flow out from us to others, and then we know on a cellular level that God dwells within us.

Richard Rohr, Spring Within, p. 203

The awareness of the divine presence is true security, true affirmation and true independence, but that reassuring presence and pervading sense of bliss is missing from everyone’s developing consciousness. Without the reassuring experience of God the world is seen to be hostile.

Thomas Keating

When the mystery we call God looks within us and through us, God sees only Himself (how ego-deflating). Yet when we look within ourselves we see someone seeking enlightenment despite the fact that the God we think we seek is already looking out of our eyes.

Martin Laird, Ocean of Light, p. 131

God comes to us disguised as our lives.

Paula D’Arcy

The creation story (Gen 1:26) states, “Let us make humans in our image.” The secret is somehow planted within you and slowly reveals itself. Your DNA is divine, and the divine indwelling is never earned by any behavior or any ritual, but only recognized and realized (see Rom 11:6, Eph 2:8-10) and fallen in love with. You will know you are standing under the same waterfall of mercy as everyone else and receiving an undeserved radical grace, which gets to the root of your own soul. Without that underlying experience of God as both abyss and ground, it is almost impossible to live in the now, warts and all, and almost impossible to experience the Presence that always fills the abyss and shakes the ground.

Richard Rohr, Yes, And, p. 67

Prayer is the opening of mind and heart—our whole being—to God, the Ultimate Mystery, beyond thoughts, words, and emotions. Through grace we open our awareness to God whom we know by faith is within us, closer than breathing, closer than thinking, closer than choosing—closer than consciousness itself. —

Thomas Keating Open Mind, Open Heart, p. 175

We rarely think of the air we breathe; yet it is in us and around us all the time. In a similar fashion, the presence of God penetrates us, is all around us, is always embracing us.

Thomas Keating

The Kingdom of Heaven is waiting for release in the silence of your heart. Heaven comes every moment we dwell in the presence of God. Heaven comes when I know I am one with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Paul Bane

God is omnipresent not as a theological doctrine, but as the great silence that is present in every moment—but from which we are usually distracted by an overactive mind that refuses to wait in a humble unknowing for a pure wisdom from above [James 3:17].

James P. Danaher, “What’s So Perennial About the Perennial Philosophy?” “The Perennial Tradition,” Oneing, vol. 1, no. 1. Rohr, Daily Meditation 8/13/19

Only surrendering humbly to the radical path of love will result in the discovery that God is not the object of our longing and love, but is the loving itself. God is the force that is binding, moving, sustaining, and transforming all of humanity and all of creation with every breath and every evolutionary shift on our planet.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devo 9/23/19

“The visible world is an active doorway to the invisible world, and the invisible world is much larger than the visible.” Francis of Assisi. I would call this mystical insight “the mystery of incarnation,” or the essential union of the material and the spiritual worlds, or simply “Christ.” Matter is, and has always been, the hiding place for Spirit, forever offering itself to be discovered anew. Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus means when he says, “I am the gate” (John 10:7).

Richard Rohr CAC Morning Devo 9/29/19

As we journey toward the God who causes us to seek, may we discover our own grounding silence and awake in God who has found us from all eternity. 

Martin Laird, An Ocean of Light, p. xvi

When I am dreaming quantum dreams, what I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net. It is made of energy, not thread. As I look, I can see light moving through it as a pulse moves through veins. What I see “out there” is no different from what I feel inside. There is a living hum that might be coming from my neurons but might just as well be coming from the furnace of the stars. Where am I in this picture? I am all over the place. I am up there, down here, inside my skin and out. I am large compared to a virus and small compared to the sun, with a life that is permeable to them both. Am I alone? How could I ever be alone? I am part of a web that is pure relationship, with energy available to me that has been around since the universe was born. Where is God in this picture? God is all over the place. God is up there, down here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is. God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very elegance and passion that make it all go. This is the God who is not somewhere but everywhere.

Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web, p. 73–74

THE HOMING DEVICE. It is God within you who loves God. By ourselves, we do not know how or where to look for God. We don't even know what God looks like. We don't know what to think— or if we should try to think at all. God planted a little bit of God inside you we call it the indwelling Holy Spirit (John 14:16-17)-and from that place within you, like a homing device, God seeks and loves God. It is happening to you, through you, toward you, within you, and from you. All you can do is allow the spring inside you to well up (John 4:14) and flow through you. Go to this holy place within you, which is the only place big enough to allow you to encounter, hold, and bear the darkness.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation Day 346

The Incarnation Changes Everything. G.K. Chesterton once observed that even those who don’t believe in the doctrine of the Incarnation are different for having heard it. If you have taken in the story of the baby who is God, you simply aren’t the same person you were before. 

First, your understanding of God will be revolutionized. A God capable of the Incarnation isn’t competing with creatures for dominance on the same playing field. To shift the metaphor, he isn’t so much the most impressive character in the novel as he is the author, responsible for every character in the story, yet never jostling for position among them.

The closer God gets to a creature, the more beautiful and radiant that creature can become. A striking and beautiful anticipation of the Incarnation is found in the episode of the burning bush recounted in the book of Exodus. Though the bush is on fire with the presence of the Creator, it is transfigured, not consumed. Christian doctrine insists, in a similar vein, that nothing of the humanity of Jesus has to give way in the presence of his divinity. His humanity is lifted up, perfected and splendid: Christ is fully divine and fully human. 

If God has stooped low to join himself to the human race, then we have a purpose and destiny. In the light of Christmas, we see that the goal of human life isn’t simply to be ethically upright, politically powerful, aesthetically accomplished or autonomous. Rather, it is to be a sharer in the divine nature. As the Church Fathers distilled it: Deus fit homo ut homo fieret Deus. “God became man that man might become God.”

This “divinization,” within the confines of this life, looks like love, since love is what God is. When we will the good of the other even in the simplest way, we are participating in the divine nature. And in the life to come, divinization means love at the highest pitch, in the most complete way, which lasts forever.

Bishop Robert Barron, The Incarnation Changes Even Nonbelievers, Wall Street Journal, 1/4/24