"Relationship...................."

”It is not prayer we seek in prayer, but God, Himself. It is not an experience of God, but the living God inherent in, and yet transcending, all experience.”

My two copies of James Finley’s tribute to Thomas Merton are loaned out to friends, so I am not sure which man should get the credit for the above quote. Nonetheless, whoever said it, as far as I’m concerned, has captured the gift that Jesus actually purchased for us via Calvary’s crucifixion and Sunday morning’s resurrection. We speak of Christ having “spanned the gulf” between Heaven and Earth, but seem unwilling to think of such bridge in terms of an existing connection available unto us. Like Caesar of old, “He came, He saw, He conquered”; then He ascended and we’ve been trying to cross on our own ever since. We preach the Book. We build our individual Towers of Babel. The doorway to Infinity, however, is a living extension of the Trinity, a Reality who dwells within those who would dare to plumb their own depths, the One waiting to take us “through the veil”, God, Himself, the “cleft in the rock”… Over the weekend I heard three sermons, each one dealing with a different aspect of benefits that the Holy Spirit extends unto us, none of them addressing the subject in terms of the Third Person of the Trinity actually being the embodiment of such treasures. Grace, faith, peace, answers to our pleas for whatsoever, are all seen as items we can achieve through our “works”, indeed the achievement thereof being the focus upon which we should come full force. I see it, however, as more of a need for us to “push into Him”, to “become one with the Indwelling”, and therein find all that He is, the Keeper of my soul, the Assurance in my next step. In losing that bit of truth, it seems to me that the Church, as a whole, has either drifted into religious sleep or charged into what the Bible, in one place, calls “strange fire”…….