The Paschal Mystery
Crucifixion and Resurrection
The spiritual journey leads through the stages of Purgation and Illumination to Union or Spiritual Marriage. We traverse the ordeal of Crucifixion and cross the threshold of Resurrection.
The Mystery of the Crucifixion is the mystery of death. We all die. It is one of the operating conditions of existence. It just comes with the territory: no life without death. Cynthia Bourgeault argues that it is a necessary condition of the binary nature of this realm of existence; only within its “sharp edges and term limits” do the conditions obtain for the most tender and vulnerable aspects of divine love. The divine self-disclosure as agape, as sacrificial love, is revealed only under these conditions. Death and finitude are the backdrop against which everything else unfolds.1
Divine love traverses the tension of opposites that we experience, including the final opposition of death and life. The Crucifixion of Jesus is the sacramental act, in which divine love penetrates to the depths of duality and reconnects it with the root of union from which all things spring.
In stillness nailed. To hold all time, all change, all circumstance in and to Love’s embrace.2
Nothing is left out of awareness. Everything belongs. This is the scope of love that we see on the Cross: everything is accepted, forgiven, reconciled and enfolded in Love’s embrace. Jesus becomes all Love, and in doing so everything in him that is not Love is relinquished. His identity, his life, his sense of separation, his attachment to success and security: all this is annihilated on the altar of Love.
This is the “Dark Night of the Soul” that St. John of the Cross describes. It is the complete loss of a separate sense of self apart from God. Whereas earlier on the spiritual journey, our senses are purged, our attachments to wealth, honor and pride as St. Ignatius describes it; in this stage, we are purged of our very identity. The curtain of the Temple, separating heaven and earth, is torn in two. We completely abandon ourselves to God in trust so that Love can embrace everything.
On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised–oh, happy chance!–
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my
heart.This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me–
A place where none appeared.Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.3
Here, ego-identity ceases. This is experienced as a kind of death. It inevitably occurs in our literal death, but there are those who experience it spiritually before the death of the body. It seems to happen only after much affliction, rejection, and struggle; it is a process of descent into the depths, requiring the harrowing of hell.
On the other side of death, there is resurrection. The soul is united with God and continues as a more subtle body on a different plane of existence. Such a soul seems to move between the realms – communing with the saints in heaven and on earth. Again, this union or spiritual marriage may precede death. St. Teresa of Avila describes this state in this way:
The Lord appears in the center of the soul, not in an imaginative vision but in an intellectual one, although more delicate than those mentioned, as He appeared to the apostles without entering through the door when He said to them pax vobis. What God communicates here to the soul in an instant is a secret so great and a favor so sublime – and the delight the soul experiences so extreme – that I don’t know what to compare it to. I can only say that the Lord wishes to reveal for that moment, in a more sublime manner than through any spiritual vision or taste, the glory of heaven. One can say no more – insofar as can be understood – than that the soul, I mean spirit, is made one with God . . . The soul always remains with its God in that center.4
What Teresa wishes to emphasize is that awareness of God is no longer a fleeting experience, but rather a permanent condition, in such a way that the soul is united with God. The first effect of this union is forgetfulness of self. One continues to eat and sleep, etc. but entirely in service to our Lord. Secondly, the soul has a great desire to suffer so long as the will of God be done. Nothing can disturb its interior peace and joy. There is no fear of death. Finally, there is no desire for consolations or spiritual delights, since the soul is united with God. There is great detachment and desire either to be alone with God, or occupied in something that will benefit another soul. Teresa is describing the divinization of the person, or theosis.5
This attainment of nondual consciousness, of Christ consciousness, paradoxically arises in the descent into the depths of duality. We embrace the opposites in love and return to union with the Source. Jesus describes it in the Gospel of Thomas in this way:
Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, “These nursing babies are like those who enter the Kingdom.” They said to him, “Then shall we enter the Kingdom as babies?”
Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below; and when you make the male and the female one and the same so that the male not be male and the female female; and when you fashion eyes in place of an eye, and a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness, then you will enter the Kingdom.”6
The movement here is from duality, as an infant and mother, but completely surrendered and vulnerable, dependent upon the milk of divine love, to awakening to one’s Christ consciousness so that one’s self is replaced with the divine image.
Whether one enters this stage of Union before or after physical death, one enters into a field of endless and boundless dynamic transformation into the “fullness” of divine love, which is infinite. St. Gregory Nysaa describes it as epektasis, “straining forward” into the fullness of God’s infinite being. We will never plumb the depths of God’s love.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus (Boston: Shambala Publications, Inc., 2008), p. 111-123.
Anonymous author quoted in Bourgeault, p. 124.
St. John of the Cross, “The Dark Night.”
St. Teresa of Avila, The Collected Works of Saint Teresa of Avila: Volume Two, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1980), p. 433-434.
Ibid, p. 438-441.
Gospel of Thomas, Logion 22.