“The idea of God’s having any needs at all, let alone needing us, may sound like an alien, even heretical idea, yet it is a realization that many contemplatives come to.”
— Gerald G. May in The Dark Night of the Soul

St. Teresa of Avila (Spain)
Count yours truly as a contemplative Christian, one whose personal theology — what I believe about God and why I believe it — has been shaped largely by the influence of St. Teresa of Avila and her Spanish buddy St. John of the Cross.
In the book excerpt below, the late and great contemplative Christian writer, psychiatrist and cofounder of the Shalem Institute Gerald G. May mulls on the thought of the two mystic Spaniards.
It’s taken from Mays’ book The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth.
“It is usual for people to think of God as the Supreme Being, the Lord and Master of all Creation, the omnipotent Higher Power who is in charge of everything. Such a God is separate from us, transcendent, above and beyond us, and capable of giving us good things and bad things. We naturally pray for the good things we want and for relief from the bad things we don’t want. And usually it doesn’t work. We don’t get all we want, and we get too much of what we don’t want. Logically, then, that transcendent, omnipotent, and separate God seems arbitrary at best, unloving at worst.
“But the contemplatives, as we have seen with Teresa and John, emphasize God’s immanence as well as transcendence. God is our center, they say, closer to us than we are to ourselves. We are immersed in God, and God is immersed in us. So if the transcendent God ‘out there’ is arbitrary or unloving to us, that same God is being arbitrary or unloving to the God ‘in here.’
“An alternative vision, one that I find repeatedly in contemplative literature, is that instead of God’s being unloving or arbitrary, God may not be so omnipotent. Or at least the power of God may not extend to making God invulnerable. Most contemplatives see God as being wounded when and as we are wounded, sharing our sufferings as well as our joys. When bad things happen to us, they also happen to God. This is certainly in keeping with Teresa’s sense of the Holy One’s being surrendered to us in love and needing us to love, to be loved by, and to manifest God’s love in the world.
“The idea of God’s having any needs at all, let alone needing us, may sound like an alien, even heretical idea, yet it is a realization that many contemplatives come to. Theologically, if God is indeed all-loving–if God is love–then that love must necessarily temper God’s omnipotence. Love always transforms power, making it softer, deeper and richer. Conversely, it may be only in our vulnerability, in our actually being wounded, that love gains its full power. Thus true omnipotence may not be found in a distant and separate power over something or someone, but rather in the intimate experience of being wounded for and with.
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