Richard writes of conversion as an experience of participating in divine reality:
Before conversion, we tend to think God is out there. After transformation, God is not out there, and we don’t look at reality. We’re in the middle of it now; we’re a part of it. This whole thing is what I call the mystery of participation. Paul is obsessed with the idea that we’re all participating in something bigger than ourselves. “In Christ” is his code phrase for this new participatory life. In fact, he uses the phrase “in Christ” 164 times to describe this organic unity and participation in Christ. “I live no longer, not I; but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). “In Christ” is his code phrase for this new participatory life.
It’s a completely different experience of life. I’m not writing the story by myself. I’m a character inside of a story that is being written in cooperation with God and the rest of humanity. This changes everything about how I see my life. A participatory theology says, “I am being chosen, I am being led, I am being used.” After conversion, you know that your life is not about you; you are about life! You are about God. You’re an instance of both the agony and the ecstasy of God that is already happening inside of you, and all you can do is say yes to it. That’s conversion and it changes everything.
After conversion, you don’t experience self-consciousness so much as what the mystics call pure consciousness. Self-consciousness implies a dualistic split, with me over here thinking about that over there. The mind remains at that dualistic, either/or, and “othering” level. When we have a mystical experience, the subject/object split is overcome. Of course, we can’t maintain it forever, but we’ll know it once in a while, and we’ll never be satisfied with anything less. In unitive experience, we’re freed from the burden of self-consciousness; we’re living in, through, and with another. It’s like the experience of truly being in love. Falling and being in love, like unitive experience, cannot be sustained at the ecstatic level, but it can be touched upon and then integrated throughout the rest of our life.
True union does not absorb distinctions, but actually intensifies them. The more we give of ourselves in creative union with another, the more we become our authentic self. This is mirrored in the Trinity: perfect giving and perfect receiving between three persons who are all still completely themselves. The more we become our True Self, the more capable we are of not overprotecting the boundaries of the false self. We have nothing to protect after transformation, and that’s the great freedom and the great happiness we see in converted people like Paul. As Paul puts it, “Because of Christ, I now consider my former advantages as disadvantages.… All of it is mere rubbish if only I can have a place in him” (Philippians 3:7–8).
the shape of a soul (when the shine fades)
| CHUCK DEGROATAUG 11 |
You’ve been told the lie
(though not in so many words)
that if you don’t shine
You’ll disappear.
That you won’t be seen
if you’re not on.
That digital space is crowded
and the algorithms demand your sacrifice.
Feed the glow, they say
Curate brilliance
(even if you don’t have it in you)
The digital egosphere requires its offering.
So you polish your moments,
(and trim the ragged edges)
filter the light until it flatters,
until you are palatable enough to trend.
Yet in the quiet
when the screen dims
and the crowd scrolls past
You feel the hollowing.
What good is being seen
if I am no longer here?
What worth is relevance
if it costs me presence?
I want you to step back
let the glow fade
let the silence swell
until you remember the shape of your own soul.
To shine, not for them,
but because
the light within
is enough.
