How to Journey towards the Unmediated Union with God
If you ever had a desire for a more palpable foretaste of fruits that lay at the end of our spiritual journey or if you wish to decipher a deeper meaning of spiritual delights available for us all along its path, this book might be for you. For what awaits us in heaven is the glory of God directly shared with us without a need for any kind of mediation. In that unmediated union “we shall see God in his essence [in] the same [way He] sees himself… [and] in that vision we shall see the same thing that God sees,” (Summa Theologica, Supplementum q82, a1, 2). Yet, along the way as wayfarers here on earth, our knowledge of God is still mediated by “spiritual delights” and therefore we are only “united to him as to something unknown,” (Supplementum q82, a1, 3).
When a union with God is realized through grace of divine courtship “a soul experiences the “divine things in their own manner of expression that only one who has experienced them can understand: he rejoices over them and keeps silent about them… So it is that the divine touch gives a foretaste of eternal life even if the joy is not as perfect as it will be in eternal glory. The soul ‘tastes here, by participation, all the divine riches, the fortitude, wisdom, love, beauty, grace, goodness, and so on. And because God is all these things, a person enjoys them in only one touch of God, and the soul rejoices within its faculties and within its substance. From this blissful delight of the soul, sometimes the unction of the Holy Spirit overflows into the body. Then all the sensory substance, all the members and bones and marrow rejoice . . . with a feeling of great delight and glory, even in the outermost joints of the hands and feet.’ In this foretaste of eternal life the soul feels she has been rewarded, richly and far beyond her merits for all her former efforts, troubles, difficulties and penances,” (Edith Stein, The Science of the Cross, 200).
