{"id":10000,"date":"2012-03-30T07:02:08","date_gmt":"2012-03-30T12:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/carlmccolman\/?p=10000"},"modified":"2018-11-24T16:57:04","modified_gmt":"2018-11-24T20:57:04","slug":"with-great-reverence-and-above-reason","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/carlmccolman\/2012\/03\/with-great-reverence-and-above-reason\/","title":{"rendered":"With Great Reverence and Above Reason"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

But now see what it is to adore God: it is, in the Christian faith, with great reverence and above reason, to gaze in the spirit upon God, the Eternal Power, Creator and Lord of heaven and earth and all that in them is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 John Ruysbroeck, The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love<\/a><\/p>\n

The Anglican contemplative Maggie Ross is well known for her advocacy of beholding<\/em>\u00a0as a core element of contemplative practice, as seen in the title of her most recent book, Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding<\/a>. The Cur\u00e9 D\u2019Ars famously defined prayer as \u201cI look at God, and God looks at me.\u201d Anyone who\u2019s ever had a lover knows the delirious joy of simply, wordlessly, gazing into the eyes of your beloved. Heaven on earth.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s a delight to find this little quotation from the fourteenth century Flemish mystic, John Ruysbroeck (also spelled \u201cRuusbroec\u201d), whom Evelyn Underhill called \u201cone of the greatest of Christian contemplatives,\u201d about the humbly central role that simple gazing plays in contemplative practice. \u201cWith great reverence\u201d \u2014 in other words, such gazing is not lazy or indifferent \u2014 \u201cand above reason\u201d \u2014 clearly recognizing that contemplative beholding takes us to that metanoia<\/em>\u00a0place, that place \u201cbeyond the mind\u201d where Divine nonduality may be apprehended intuitively but not \u201cthought about\u201d discursively \u2014 we are invited, in love, to simply be present to the already-present presence of God.<\/p>\n

In our gazing we do not seek to find God, but rather relax into the fact that God has already found us. And there we may cherish and relish, in a single moment within which all eternity unfolds,\u00a0the boundless silence of union with Divine Love.<\/p>\n

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But now see what it is to adore God: it is, in the Christian faith, with great reverence and above reason, to gaze in the spirit upon God, the Eternal Power, Creator and Lord of heaven and earth and all that in them is. \u2014 John Ruysbroeck, The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1658,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[2366],"class_list":["post-10000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemplation","tag-john-ruysbroeck"],"yoast_head":"\nWith Great Reverence and Above Reason<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"But now see what it is to adore God: it is, in the Christian faith, with great reverence and above reason, to gaze in the spirit upon God, the Eternal\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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