Above: Simeon and Anna, by Arent de Gelder.
By Roland Ashby
Before Dorothy Day became the politically radical editor of the US newspaper The Catholic Worker, she was an atheist and a communist. She became pregnant during this time, and, theologian Matthew Fox says, “she was so overcome by the beauty of bearing a new living being inside her that she converted to Christianity. Why? ‘Because I had to give thanks to someone’, she said. God is the One to whom we render our thanks.”
This experience of being overcome in this way, leading to profound awe, joy and gratitude, is also an experience of rapture. “Rapture”, says author, contemplative and clinical psychologist James Finley, “is a moment of love or a moment of union in which you’re so ecstatically taken out of yourself that you’re momentarily not there... you’re caught up in a union for which there’s no name.”
He tells the story of a clinical psychologist friend and his wife who had just had their first child. After bringing their daughter home from the hospital he lay down on the sofa with her and put her on his chest; and she fell asleep and had her mouth near his ear, and he was listening to her breathing, and he started to cry. That’s rapture.”
In commenting on St Teresa of Avila’s book The Interior Castle, which describes seven stages in which the soul draws closer to God, he says it’s the same rapture, the same ecstasy, when the soul experiences a moment of union with the infinite love that is God.
When the eight day old baby Jesus was taken to the temple for the first time it becomes a moment of rapture for the devout Elder Simeon who recognises him as Christ the Saviour, and holding him in his arms, gives thanks to God and praises him for this moment of joy and revelation, which is celebrated in the Nunc Dimittis, the Song of Simeon (Luke 2:29-32):
Now, Lord, you let your servant go in peace:
Your word has been fulfilled.
My own eyes have seen the salvation:
Which you have prepared in the sight of every people:
A light to reveal you to the nations:
And the glory of your people Israel.
Advent, which began on Sunday 29 November, is the season in which Christians prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ, but it is also about giving birth to Christ in our inmost heart, and like Simeon, becoming enraptured with the light that reveals God “to the nations” and brings salvation to the world.
James Finley says that in the Seventh and final stage of Teresa of Avila’s vision of the soul’s earthly journey towards God, “the deepest depths of the depths of God are given to us at the deepest depths of our self.”
And it’s at the deepest depths of ourselves that we find our true selves, “hidden with Christ in God before the origins of the universe.”