Resurrection

33rd Week in Ordinary Time - Saturday (24 November 2018)

Revelation 11:4-12. Psalm 144:1-2, 9-10. Luke 20:27-40.

“In God all people are alive.”

Is there anything that I need to do first to merit God's love? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We don't earn or merit God's unconditional love; He has loved us before we were conceived in our mother's womb, from the beginning of the universe, and even before this universe took shape. Alive or dead we belong to the Lord. We are His Beloved, no matter what. His love for me does not depend on my worthiness, or on my good works. He always and everywhere loves me, He loves me whatever condition I am in. Sinful or holy, just or unjust, good or bad, ugly or beautiful.

So death is not a barrier for God's love. Love is stronger than death. God's love does not change ever! How can a loving God suddenly become a stingy, revengeful and punishing God? That's not possible. This is the beauty of God, never-changing beauty of God's compassion and love. Therefore, resurrection is all about experiencing God's love in its fullness. It is only a final stage of our journey perhaps. It is all about starting the experience here and now. It is all given to me already and always. Let us have no fear. God's life and his transforming love is given to me freely and abundantly. There are no terms and conditions for this. This is resurrection, this is eternal life.

Once as Thomas Merton finds himself at the junction of a busy, crowded shopping locality in Louisville, he is suddenly overwhelmed with a mystical realization that he loves all those people. He writes, "They were mine and I theirs. We could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. I have the immense joy of being human, a member of a race in which God became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.

         At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty 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 of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely."

Resurrection experience is a discovery that we are immortal and pure diamonds that we already are: an experience and a discovery that starts here and now!

See also "Participating in the Mystery of God," https://anthuvanmaria.blogspot.com/2018/06/new-power-and-new-life.html.