Posted by During 2024, The World Community for Christian Meditation is exploring the theme ‘Beholding Divine Beauty: And God Saw That It Was Very Good’. As part of this, there will be 10 sessions held online via the WCCM website throughout the year exploring aspects of “Beauty, Goodness and the Act of Creation” in various ways “including art, theology and social justice.” These posts (parts 1 and 2) briefly explore the theme and how it relates to human creativity and meditation.
And yet…our lives, to some extent, have us out of touch, inattentive, to the God life in all, and absent to our abiding original goodness. What is happening?
Not to see in the light of our original, God created, goodness is to see (as John Main put it) through “the prism of the ego”. This prism distorts our vision of reality. Rather than fundamentally good, we might see reality as, say, fundamentally competitive, perhaps as all about survival rather than a shared thriving. And because we see it this way, we create the way we live, the systems we live in, as a reflection of this prism seeing.
And so, we have the ‘baked in’ inequality of our current economic system; we have the war and conflict happening now, as well as the growing effects of climate change. All of this is the result of humanity creating in ways not consistent with our original goodness, nor with the divine goodness in and of creation.
We have co-created not as God creates. Collectively, we still see and act too much as if ego is our original nature. It is not. It is, ultimately, a self-centred distortion of Reality.
What we must do, now more than ever, is grow in God sight. Meditation, as our chosen essential and daily practice, helps us in this.
As we meditate, we behold into divine beauty.
Behold, let’s look at that word. It is made up of two words – be and hold. As we gently and faithfully repeat our word, we are gently and faithfully holding attention, as lightly as we can, on the mantra. As we do this, we allow grace, the divine life, to do its loving work in us.
Over time, to be becomes more natural. As we meditate, we grow in attentiveness to our God-given being, our original goodness. Holding attention lightly on the mantra draws attention into this being that we deeply are.
And so, meditation is beholding; it is holding attention on the mantra so we can psychologically deepen into our own being and so act more and more as a human-being in life, that is, living and co-creating from the goodness of being, and less from the distortion of the ego.
This is the work of conversion, changing the way we see and so act in the world. Ego is being transformed from this distorting prism to a clear and clean window through which we see creation more and more as it really is, as fundamentally very good.
As this happens, our creative actions are affected by this window-vision – seeing things more as they are and could be, as built on and somehow reflecting the ‘very goodness’ at the heart of creation.
So, as we be-hold into divinity and being, that is, as we meditate, it becomes more natural generally to behold, that is to reverently see with the eyes of the heart, the divine beauty of creation. This sight can then affect the way we act, how we co-create with God. We then have the chance to create in ways more consistent with the God-life, uniquely as ourselves, and more as Jesus would do.