Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Have faith in God and faith in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places; otherwise, how could I have told you that I was going to prepare a place for’ you? I am indeed going to prepare a place for you, and then I shall come back to take you with me, that where I am you also may be. You know the way that leads where I go.”
“Lord,” said Thomas, “we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus told him: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father also. From this point on you know him; you have seen him.”
“Lord,” Philip said to him, “show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” “Philip,” Jesus replied, “after I have been with you all this time, you still do not know me?”
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I speak are not spoken of myself; it is the Father who lives in me accomplishing his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works I do. I solemnly assure you, the one who has faith in me will do the works I do, and greater far than these. Why? Because I go to the Father.” [John 14:1-12]
The basic text for Christian practice is “the Father and I are one.” Christ came to save us from our sins, but only as the essential preliminary to our ultimate destiny. The source of all sin is the sense of a separate self.
The separate-self sense is, of course, the false self. The false self is to be surrendered to Christ through the love of his sacred humanity and the divine Person who possesses it. Christ is the way to the Father. His human nature and personality is the door to his divinity. By identification with him as a human being, we find our true self – the divine life within us – and begin the process of integration into the life of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Christ came to communicate to each of us his own personal experience of the Father. However, even when the separate self has been joined to Christ, it is still a self. The ultimate state to which we are called is beyond any fixed point of reference such as a self. It transcends the personal union with Christ to which Paul referred when he said, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”
The death of Jesus on the cross was the death of his personal self, which in his case was a deified self. Christ’s resurrection and ascension is his passage into the Ultimate Reality: the sacrifice and loss of his deified self [united] with the Godhead. Since all reality is the manifestation of the Godhead and Christ has passed into identification with It, Christ is present everywhere and in everything. The cosmos is now the Body of the glorified Christ who dwells in every part of it.
Union with Christ on the cross – our entrance into his experience – leads to the death of our separate-self sense. To embrace the cross of Christ is to be willing to leave behind the self as a fixed point of reference. It is to die to all separation, even to a self that has been transformed. It is to be one with God, not just to experience it.
Jesus’ invitation to take up your cross every day and follow me” is a call to do what he actually did. As the Way, Jesus invites us to follow his example step-by-step into the bosom of the Father. As the Truth, he shares with us, through participation in his death on the cross, the experience of the transpersonal aspect of the Father. As the Life, he leads us to unity with the God beyond personal and impersonal relationships. On the Christian path, God is known first as the personal God, then as the transpersonal God, and finally as the Ultimate Reality beyond all personal and impersonal categories. Since God’s existence, knowledge and activity are one, Ultimate Reality is discovered to be That-which-is.
~Adapted from Thomas Keating, The Mystery of Christ
