Louisville Process Theology Network

Three Levels of Living in Oneness

Jan 13, 2010

From Page 103:


?“Faith is a plunge into the mystery of life. When it seeks to avoid that mystery by having recourse to conventional formulas, without ever probing their meaning, faith itself can become a form of diversion. A faith of pre-packaged, un-thought-out answers to all the important issues of life is a diversionary faith. Persons of true faith travel, not without difficulty, toward the heart of mystery.

Such a person discovers that ?‘his mystery and the mystery of God merge into one reality, which is the only reality.?’ This reality is that God lives in us and we in God. Our heart beats in the heart of God.

?… I would suggest that Merton is telling us that there are three levels at which we can live. First, there is the phenomenal level, where harmony seems to exist or, if it doesn?’t, we are able to divert ourselves from the disharmony and live insulated as far as possible from the disturbing, the troublesome and the burdensome. This is the level of diversion, where people live with a good deal of fiction in their lives.

There is a second level of human existence, which might be called the existential level. This is the level, where below the surface realities of life, we are in direct contact with life?’s complexities, incongruities, contradictions and absurdities. This is the level which the ?‘solitary?’ chooses to explore and from which he refuses to be diverted.

The third is the contemplative level. The solitary realizes his potential as a ?‘contemplative?’ and breaks through the level of seeming meaninglessness and enters into the mystery of the true self and, in doing so, enters at the same time into the mystery of God. It is at this level that life?’s contradictions and absurdities are resolved.?”