God’s enduring presence places the false self in a blessed insecurity. The false self is like a drop of stagnant water thrown into the raging furnace of the love of God. Even in our sins, in God’s eyes we remain the great pearl for which he has lost all upon the cross in order to possess us as his own. Even in the midst of revolt, we remain his one lost sheep for which he has wandered in the wastes of death in order to bring us back to his fold.
God never does violence to the essential freedom by which we can negate ourselves as persons made in his image. But the nature of his love is such that his affirmation of us always overwhelms our negation of him. His loving advance, his covenant love (hesed) envelops and upholds us more assuredly than our next breath.
In this is our hope that nothing shall “separate us from the love of God which comes to us in Christ Jesus, our Lord” (Rom 8:39). In this is our joy that regardless of how distorted our hearts have become, regardless of what our conscience holds against us “God is greater than hearts” (1 Jn 3:20). After one glance of his love, our false self, in spite of all its apparent imbeddedness, dissolves away like a bad dream. That’s all it is anyway—a bad dream that passes with the dawning of God’s love. Our weakness remains, but it is a handed-over weakness, made strong in its openness and abandonment to God’s mercy.
This simultaneous presence of light and darkness, of truth and falsity is one of the paradoxes of spiritual life. Referring first to the true self, Merton says:
Since our inmost “I” is the perfect image of God, then when that “I” awakens, he finds within himself the Presence of Him Whose image he is. And, by a paradox beyond all human expression, God and the soul seem to have but one single “I.” They are (by divine grace) as though one single person. They breathe and live and act as one. “Neither” of the “two” is seen as object.
But then he adds the experiential context in which the awareness of this true self takes place and the solution of the apparent dilemma this experience entails:
To anyone who has full awareness of our “exile” from God, our alienation from this inmost self, and our blind wandering in the “region of unlike-ness,” this claim can hardly seem believable. Yet, it is nothing else but the message of Christ calling us to awake from sleep, to return from exile, and find our true selves within ourselves, in that inner sanctuary which is his temple and his heaven, and (at the end of the prodigal’s homecoming journey) the “Father’s house.”
And so we must come to recognize and acknowledge our false self, but even more to acknowledge the true self that sleeps within us like Lazarus in the tomb waiting for the voice of Jesus to awaken us to life.
No one knows what first stirs in the tombs of those awakened by God’s incessant call. The first moment of conversion (metanoia) is the hidden gift that can, as with Paul, knock us to the ground, or as with Augustine, move us to tears by the song of children and a word of scripture. Or, as is often the case, this call of God is like a gradual, subtle, stirring that grows within us, perhaps unnoticed, like a small flower unfolding in an enclosed garden. God plants this seed. It is he that makes it grow, but he does so only with our cooperation. We must help to bring about this awakening within us.
~From James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere
