Mysterious You: How your union with God makes you divine

by Kelley Weber

Scroll to the bottom of the post for the video overview!

I feel like we could totally use a gameshow called “Heresy or Doctrine?”

The host makes a statement, then the contestants push their buzzer - Heresy if they think the statement is categorically false, and doctrine if they think there’s scripture to support the statement.”  

We might be surprised by what the contestants think.. 

Let’s play.

Here’s your first statement: We human beings are Divine. 

Heresy or Doctrine? Go ahead, push your imaginary buzzers. 

Ready for the answer? That’s a true statement. Yup! We humans have the spark of divinity in us. 

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Now here’s what that statement does NOT mean - 

• It does not mean you are God. 
• It does not mean that Christians are divine and other religions are not. 
• It does not mean that your divinity is the same as Jesus’ divinity. 

Here’s what the statement DOES mean - 

• It means that you are created in the image of God. You are made of “Godstuff.” 
• It means that God is revealed in and through your actions in the world. You are an ambassador of the divine. 
• It means that you are anointed in the same spirit of the Christ as Jesus. While Jesus was the perfect manifestation of the Christ, your journey will always endeavor to follow Jesus. You may never do this perfectly, but there’s comfort in the fact that you are on the same path that Jesus himself followed. 

I know; still a lot to wrap your mind around. I think of it this way:learning about who God is – and who we are in relation to God – is like finding pieces to a puzzle The more pieces we find, the bigger we realize the puzzle is! God is not unknowable, but rather endlessly knowable.

Seems mysterious, right? How do we talk about Mystery? Well, let’s start with the Poets, Mystics, and Prophets of old to point us towards language that helps us understand the Mysteries of God.

First, here’s a prophetic voice from the book of Acts chapter 17:

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And is not served by human hands, as if God needs anything. Rather, God gives…everything! ‘For in God we live and move and have our being.’As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are the offspring of the Divine.’”

Meister Eckhart, medieval German philosopher and mystic, also described our connection to the Divine.  

“When man is created, God is revealed. God is not outside one’s self but as one’s self and in one’s self. Eckhart would say that it is equally true that we exist within God as God exists within us. ‘For in God we live and move and have our being.’”

It’s like God is the artist and we are the artwork. The two are separate entities but they are deeply reliant on each other. The artwork does not exist without the artist and the artist is not made known except through their art. There is a unity to their existence.

Eckhart says, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love.”

Finally, in his poem Hagia Sophia, Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton expresses this Oneness as a paradox where God is the “hidden wholeness” found within our fragmented and very human selves.

“There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a
dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden whole-
ness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom,
the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all
things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence
that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in word-
less gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen
roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly,
saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at
once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of
my Creator's Thought and Art within me, speaking
as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.”

So, to sum up:

• You are made of Godstuff. 
• You reveal God’s self, as you are created by God. Art and Artist.
• Though you are not perfect (like Jesus), but bear the burden of a fragmented self, within each of us is a hidden wholeness - a True Self - borne out of the image of God, that is as accessible to you as your own breath. 

Jesus was not a 30 year experiment in incarnation. He was an invitation, a model for us all. You are called to the same incarnational reality, the same divinity, the same presence of Christ. And here’s the thing: once we recognize ourselves as a creation of God’s artistry, only then can we start to recognize this artistry in others! Only then can we start to see others the same way God sees them and with the same eye of unconditional love.

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