Saturday, August 16, 2025: This whole thing is what I call the mystery of participation

Before our personal conversion, we tend to think God is out there -- think the ceiling of the sistine chapel God with flowing white beard. After a personal transformation, God is not out there but inside each of us as the circle of the Divine expands to include all living beings and non-living things, the ever expanding universe and a wholly different experience  We’re in the middle of it now; we’re a part of it. This whole thing is what I call the mystery of participation. 

Paul is obsessed with the idea that we’re all participating in something bigger than ourselves. “In Christ” is his code phrase for this new participatory life. In fact, he uses the phrase “in Christ” 164 times to describe this organic unity and participation in Christ. “I live no longer, not I; but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). “In Christ” is his code phrase for this new participatory life. 

“I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21 I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (note how Paul slams the law which he has found to be so lacking in love)

To be living in Christ is a completely different experience of life. I’m not writing the story by myself. 

I’m a character inside of a story that is being written in cooperation with God and the rest of humanity. This changes everything about how I see my life. 

A participatory theology says, “I am being chosen, I am being led, I am being used.” After conversion, you know that your life is not about you; you are about life! You are about God. You’re an instance of both the agony and the ecstasy of God that is already happening inside of you, and all you can do is say yes to it. That’s conversion and it changes everything.  

After conversion, you don’t experience self-consciousness so much as what the mystics call pure consciousness. Self-consciousness implies a dualistic split, with me over here thinking about that over there. The mind remains at that dualistic, either/or, and “othering” level. When we have a mystical experience, the subject/object split is overcome. 

Of course, we can’t maintain it forever, but we’ll know it once in a while, and we’ll never be satisfied with anything less. 

In unitive experience, we’re freed from the burden of self-consciousness; we’re living in, through, and with another. It’s like the experience of truly being in love. Falling and being in love, like unitive experience, cannot be sustained at the ecstatic level, but it can be touched upon and then integrated throughout the rest of our life. 

True union does not absorb distinctions, but actually intensifies them. The more we give of ourselves in creative union with another, the more we become our authentic self. This is mirrored in the Trinity: perfect giving and perfect receiving between three persons who are all still completely themselves. 

The more we become our True Self, the more capable we are of not overprotecting the boundaries of the false self. We have nothing to protect after transformation, and that’s the great freedom and the great happiness we see in converted people like Paul. As Paul puts it, “Because of Christ, I now consider my former advantages as disadvantages.… All of it is mere rubbish if only I can have a place in him” (Philippians 3:7–8). 

7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.

- Richard Rohr 

Story:

I have had the privilege to visit some of the greatest cathedrals in the world: Notre Dame, St. Peter’s Basilica, St Patrick’s, and St. Mark’s Basilica. These are wonderful churches, but I felt closer to God deep in the woods in Northern Minnesota on the Paul Bunyan Trail. There, deer, beavers, chipmunks, squirrels, and many colorful birds crossed my path. I admired the rich colors of the red-winged blackbirds and heard the woodpeckers hammering away on the trees above me. I truly felt I was seeing and participating in God’s creation, beyond what we humans can create. 

—Brent B.