Thr Forked Flame #3


My steps were slow and measured as I covered the 10-minute walk home. Since I had not tuned into Pandora there was no music to impinge on my consciousness and my thoughts turned rapidly to the Spiritual 'things' that had occupied my mind during our most recent Forty-Hour Devotion on October 6, 7, 8 of 2013. As was required, the focus of my attention had been the quaint and beautiful little monstrance we generally used for not-so-important occasions of adoration.  Somehow I always felt a greater affinity for this tiny replica than for the elaborately spiked version we normally adored on First Saturdays and during Lenten observances.

I had been silently contemplating the monstrance for several hours --in the uncanny expectation that I  may hear God speak. As time passed and the silence grew, I suddenly realized what it was about this sleek little version of the monstrance that had always fascinated me.
Sure, like any other monstrance there was the humongous Host in the center --the Body of Christ--clearly identifying Who/What is the beginning, the center and the end of the Universe. I noted too, the golden prongs emanating from the centrally positioned Host--most likely attesting to the fact that every existing species is created in the heart of God as an act of love, and is extended outwards into eternity. Perhaps, in its simplest form this is the phenomenon Thomas Merton refers to as  "the aseity of God".   And to be honest with you, once I grasped the importance of this phenomenon to my own connection to the Creator, there awoke in me, the greatest wonder and joy I have ever experienced. Because I realized that not only myself, but everything and everyone, began as 'bits and pieces' of God, Himself. And that each of us is a 'chip off the old block' --so to speak.

In this way, my seemingly endless adoration during a Forty-Hour Devotion, with this tiny monstrance on my mind, had ultimately brought me vis-a-vis Thomas Merton's exciting analysis of God's 'being-ness' and caused me to wonder how I could utilize this 'difference' in the design of the smaller monstrance (an unbroken circular band connecting the extremities of the prongs) to get a more succinct explanation of the interconnectedness between God and every created thing.

It is this circular band connecting all that emanates from the heart of God that lends excitement to Merton's musings on of the "Aseity of God".  In my mind, his thoughts add greater depth to the definition of the Latin words: "Ego sum qui sum" (I am who am); and helps banish the sense of 'formlessness' inherent in many attempts to define Who or What God is.
We may even venture to wonder if this "pure act of existing" Thomas Merton mentions could have been the very start of an incalculable yet predictable metamorphosis of that 'purity' that provoked an outpouring of love, so intense and so pure, that it self-configured into light. A light so brilliant that it enkindled a fire. A fire that generated a pulse which became enlivened and leaped forth from its epicenter--and forked in the midst of what hitherto had been 'a formless wasteland'  and so began time --in space. May we even further toy with the idea that this 'forked flame' would be a fitting symbol for the Blessed Trinity!  A flaming, three-pronged, mesmerizing, pseudo-representation of the eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
I admit I do not fully understand this "Aseity" thing. But I do say: God bless you, Merton, for inspiring in me an interest in this "notion of God" that seems deeper than the  ocean --precisely because: "God is the only such being". I believe everything that exists emanates from Him and is indeed attached to Him by an imprecarious thread. A thread that can only be severed if our natures were to become substantially different from, or estranged from, God's through grave sin. Like the 'constitutive fracture" that occurred in the relationship between Adam and Eve, and God. Indeed, in the  relationship between all of creation and God.  Fortunately, the 'sign' of the cross teaches us that God relented and provided a 'Way' back with the example of Christ's walk along the road to Calvary.  A very brutal and painful experience which did not end in death, as some still believe, but rather re-cemented man's relationship with God when Christ broke the chains of death to rise victorious from the grave.
It is this  re-established interconnectedness between God and the rest of creation that is represented by the band encircling the ends of the prongs in the smaller monstrance.
And in the center of the Sacristy, rising high above the Altar and behind the monstrance is the sign of a relenting God. The 'Sign' of the Cross. The image of a bloodied Jesus --arms widespread--as if drawing the entire world into Himself. A self that willed itself to be because of love.
Thomas Merton put it more succinctly in Seven Story Mountain: "God exists 'a se' of and by reason of himself". In other words "God is being itself. "

"And God, that center who is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, finding me through incorporation with Christ, incorporated into the immense and tremendous gravitational movement which is love, who is the Holy Spirit to me. " "And he called out to me from his own immense depths...."!
             

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