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Jesus said, “I will not leave you orphaned” (John 14:18). Faith is to trust that an intrinsic union exists between us and God. Contemplation is to experience this union. The path of fall and return is how we experience this union as pure grace and free gift.
There is a necessary movement between the two ends of the divine/human axis, between one’s core and the core of God. The only real sin is to doubt, deny, or fail to experience this basic axial connection. If you don’t have some small mirrors (partners, friends, and lovers) that are telling you you’re good, it’s very hard to believe in the Big Goodness.
The word “innocent” from its Latin root means “not wounded.” That’s how we all start life. We’re all innocent. It doesn’t have anything to do with moral right or wrong. It has to do with not being wounded yet. We start unwounded. We start innocent, but the killing of our holy innocence by power and abuse (as in the killing of the Holy Innocents by Herod [Matthew 2:1-23]) is an archetypal image of what eventually happens to all of us. Probably it has to happen for us to grow up.
We can’t stay unwounded. We have to leave the garden, so to speak. It is this movement out and back between the loneliness and desperation of the false self and the fullness of the True Self that is the process of transformation. That’s how we move to consciousness and inner freedom.
Adapted from
True Self, False Self
(CD), disc 2 and insert
Gateway to Silence:
Becoming who I am
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