THE UNITIVE LIFE - PALM SUNDAY

The Unitive Life

What is the unitive life anyway?  It's poetry, really:

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

                               Pied Beauty

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

                                                Práise hím.

Evelyn Underhill in her book, Mysticism , Oneworld, 2000 paper) describes the unitive life as a profound and abiding peace.  She writes, "We look at a small but ever-growing group of heroic figures, living at transcendent levels of reality which we, immersed in the poor life of illusion, cannot attain: breathing an atmosphere whose true quality we cannot even conceive." Well, maybe.  But we do know that there is something other out there, something that transcends ordinary  existence.  The mystic sees unity in all existence.

There is the sense that most of us live as split persons:  doing the laundry/feeling bright flashes of the wonder all around us.  Yet, the agnostic in us is at great peril. Wonder hits and runs without warning.  There are bright moments of joy.  Box one, box two.  Like Schrodinger's Cat: look and neither is where predicted. 

The true mystic, the one truly living the unitive life, describes that life as a marriage with the Source of all life.  The Holiest of the Holy for Jew and Christian alike expresses it from a woman's point of view in poetry:

⁶Set me as a seal upon your heart,
    as a seal upon your arm,
for love is strong as death,
    jealousy is fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
   the very flame of the LORD.⁷Many waters cannot quench love,
   neither can floods drown it.
If a man offered for love
   all the wealth of his house,
   he would be utterly despised.

                          --Song of Solomon 8:6-7

Fifty-six verses of the Song are hers.  She speaks of longing and fear, ecstasy and disappointment, intimacy and loneliness.  She speaks to the heart.  Her poem is a kaleidoscope of images and colors, touch and emotion. Mixed subjects rush along: I, you, he, we. The Song dances along in pictures, stepping on the hem of the one before as a dream or fantasy recalled.

This love is "like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. (8:6) and yet the lovers are not consumed- they do not lose their being in the flame. This is what the fakers miss. The lovers become more self in loving.

Jacob Boehm, who described the union between  Word and the soul puts it like this: "I give  you an earthly similitude of this.  Behold a bright flaming piece of iron, which of itself is dark and black, and the fire so penetrateth and shineth through the iron, that it giveth light.  Now, the iron doth not cease to be; it is iron still: and the source (or property) of the fire retaineth its own propriety: it doth not take iron into it, but it penetrateth (and shineth) though the iron; and it is iron then as well as fire. (quoted in Underhill, 421)

Authority teaches that to live the unitive life one must die to live.  Reborn, the new self combines one's Martha practical servanthood with contemplative Mary.  Or He, riding on a donkey followed by her foal- people singing Hosannah!  And the Cross a week later.  A difficult path to see reality as a whole, a Cosmic unity.  Most do not arrive at the fully unitive life. It's not an easy path, and not for the half hearted.  We look though the mystic's magic mirror and see a garden at the beginning and a garden at the end.  That will have to suffice until our winter is over.