Your initial sense of connection with your mother, and hopefully with your father, is the beginning of the unitive consciousness to which we ultimately want to return. If, in the early months and years, you received wonderful gazes of love from your parents (or anybody, really), mirror neurons were formed which provide the physiological foundation for intimacy. They allow you to grow into an adult capable of intimate, close, tender I-Thou relationships with others and with God.
Intimate I-Thou relationships are the greatest mirrors of all, so we dare not avoid them. By all means, you must find at least one loving, honest friend to ground you, which might even be the utterly accepting gaze of the Friend. Such a true mirror reveals your inner, deepest, and, yes, divine image. This is why intimate moments are often mirroring moments of beautiful mutual receptivity, and why such intimacy heals us so deeply.
In our times of falling, many of us discover the great Divine Gaze, the ultimate I-Thou relationship, which is always compassionate and embracing, or it would not be divine. Like any true mirror, the gaze of God receives us exactly as we are, without judgment or distortion, subtraction or addition. Such perfect receiving is what transforms us. Being totally received as we truly are is what we wait and long for all our lives.
All we can do is receive and return the loving gaze of God every day, and afterwards we will be internally free and deeply happy at the same time. The One who knows all has no trouble including, accepting, and forgiving all. Soon we who are gazed upon so perfectly can pass on the same accepting gaze to all others who need it.
Adapted from
Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 2
(CD, MP3 download);
and
Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
pp. 156, 159-160
Gateway to Silence:
The gaze of God receives me exactly as I am.
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