16
Transformation and Contemplation
The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I
saw all things in God and God in all things.
—Mechtild of Magdeburg (1212–1282)If we’ve been kept from appreciating a cosmic notion of Christ up to now, it has
not been because of bad will, ignorance, or obstinacy. It’s because we have tried
to understand a largely nondual notion with the dualistic mind that dominates
Western rationalism and scientism. That will never work. Most of us were not
told that we needed to install “software” different from the either-or, problem-
solving, all-or-nothing mind that we use to get us through the day. Only early
Christianity, and many mystics along the way, tended to understand that
contemplation is actually a different way of processing our experience—a
radically different way of seeing—which most of us have to be taught.
Such seers were almost always marginalized, like dear Mechtild quoted in the
epigraph, whom you may have never heard of. We canonized many of these
people after they died, once they were no longer so much of a threat, but many
in their lifetimes had to marginalize themselves in forests, practices of silence,
hermitages, and monasteries for their own sanity, I suspect. Garden-variety
Christianity was quite content with a God figure to worship, and they called
him Jesus, with no strong interest in what he really represented for humanity.
As we’ve seen in the preceding pages, Christ’s much larger, universe-spanning
role was described quite clearly in—and always in the first chapters of—John’s
Gospel, Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, and 1 John, and shortly thereafter in
the writings of the early Eastern Fathers, as well as many mystics along the way.
But our noncontemplative minds did not notice that these writers processed
reality differently than we do—in fact, very differently. Eventually, such