Christ Really Present
by Brian Robertson
"Christ is really present in us, more present than if He were standing before us visible to our bodily eyes. For we have become 'other Christs'.
"If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ."
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist Monk, and his writings included The Seven Storey Mountain, his autobiography. It is wonderful reading, a classic tale of moving from dissatisfaction with the world and one's life to an amazing depth of understanding.
The grace to see Christ in all is exactly what Jesus talked of as he told us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and care for those who have no one -- for in those we see and find Christ. How much more can we, in our humbleness, see the imprint of Christ in all things and beings? God is not limited to the sum total of all things -- God is both in all things and beyond all things.
But the Christian Mystic, through contemplation and cleansing and Grace, can participate in the kingdom of heaven right now, to see that kingdom alive in the way Merton so wonderfully describes.
"Why do we think of the gift of contemplation. infused contemplation, mystical prayer, as something essentially strange and esoteric reserved for a small class of almost unnatural beings and prohibited to everyone else? It is perhaps because we have forgotten that contemplation is the work of the Holy Spirit acting on our souls through His gifts of Wisdom and Understanding with special intensity to increase and perfect our love for Him. These gifts are part of the normal equipment of Christian sanctity. They are given to us at Baptism, and if they are given it is presumably because God wants them to be developed....
"If the Son of Man came to seek and save that which was lost", this was not merely in order to reestablish us in a favorable juridical position with regard to God: it, was to elevate, change and transform us humans into God, in order that God might be revealed in Man, and that all people might become One Son of God in Christ. The New Testament texts in which this mystery is stated are unequivocal, and yet they have been to a very great extent ignored not only by the faithful but also by the theologians. The Greek and Latin Fathers never made this mistake! For them, the mystery of the hypostatic union, or the union of the divine and human nature in the One Person of the Word, the God-Man, Jesus Christ, was not only a truth of the greatest, most revolutionary and most existential actuality, but it was the central truth of all being and all history. It was the key which alone could unlock the meaning of everything else, and even the inner and spiritual significance of the human person, of his actions as an individual and in society, of the world, and of the whole cosmos."
