Well, I'm typing this from my tiny office space, with just a bit of sun pouring in across Michigan Avenue. My computer speakers are pouring forth a lovely version of the Miserere (it starts with a Renaissance piece, then segues into a very contemporary choral rendition, thanks to the genius of Paul Schwarz) from the album "State of Grace."
This morning I found myself continuing to pray over an insight gleaned from Robert Barron's "And Now I See" (which, as mentioned earlier, I borrowed from Sr. Julia). Barron cites Merton on the "point vierge" in each human being. With today's Gospel highlighting the wise and foolish virgin bridesmaids, there is even a liturgical connection.
It comes down to this: each and every person, no matter how compromised their moral life or their human abilities, has at their center a "virgin point" that is totally God's, totally unadulterated. Merton said that all of us are "shining like the sun." Barron relates this, naturally, to our being the image of God. I guess Merton's language just "worked" for me to make this clearer. And this means that, ultimately, the "spiritual life" is the journey in which the exterior person becomes more and more conformed to or in tune with the "point vierge"--or that the "point vierge" expands more and more throughout our faculties (because our part is really to "let it be done") until the "point vierge" begins to mark the whole person and become more and more in reality what it is: our inmost truth, our real identity.
This is what makes me glad of this whole insight: that the "point vierge" where we are totally God's is really our truth! The center of my being and yours is true and good and beautiful, even if I am a loser or a sinner immersed in evil or so severely handicapped that all I can do is "let it be to me."
The saints are the ones who are not only in touch with this in themselves, but even more aware of that beauty in others, so that they are impelled to serve them because of that divine presence of being from Being. Washing each other's feet comes from this sort of vision of the other as bearing the divine presence, no matter how compromised the external life is. That is why Jesus washed the feet of Judas: it wasn't so much about humility and abasement as much as it was the shining presence of the Father, manifest to Jesus despite Judas' compromising values and choices. We are powerless to rid ourselves of the imago Dei.
Talk about being "fearfully, wonderfully made" as the Psalmist wrote in Psalm 139! No wonder "my soul you knew full well, nor was my frame unknown to you, when I was fashioned in secret." "Truly, you have formed my inmost being [it is you!].... All my thoughts lie open before you [you share them all]." And so St. Paul would ask the Corinthians, challenging them to align their outer life with their inner truth, "would you take the members of Christ and make them the members of a prostitute?" Because they would have become aware of that presence, so how could they keep on living as before, as if unaware of the presence? The language of a "point vierge" evokes for me openness, "yes," brightness, a hand outstretched to receive the wedding ring. It is as if there were already a "yes" at the center of my being; already a willing receptivity and responsiveness in me, as if it were mine already and I had already said yes to everything. It is a yes given to me to give. It is a yes that is meant to expand from that "point" until it characterizes me entirely, when I will be able to fully say "It is no longer I who live; Christ is living in me!" ("Christ is not yes-and-no, but yes has been in him," as St. Paul further tells us.)
Bottom line: get that book and read it! (Although there is a good bit of German, French and Latin scattered about its pages, so it's not a totally easy read, but it is a valuable one.)
Now I want to look for the source in Merton. I think it was in "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander." (I've tended to avoid Merton because of his incredible verbosity.... but this one insight should be sufficient motive for me to go to the source.)
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