Mystical union with God

Mystical union with God is the culminating intimacy of the spiritual life in which the soul encounters God not merely as an object of knowledge but as the source of its transformation. The book approaches this state through several traditions and images: an ascent through moral and spiritual preparation, a kiss between Christ and the soul, the meeting of divine and human ground, and a loving embrace beyond ordinary comprehension. These accounts differ in language and emphasis, yet converge on a movement from self-reliance toward receptivity to God.

A Journey of Preparation and Ascent

Origen’s reading of the three books of Solomon gives union a place within a larger progression. Proverbs represents the purgative way: learning to live morally and virtuously. Ecclesiastes represents illumination, the growth of spiritual understanding and the proper use of created things. The Song of Songs completes the sequence by awakening desire and love for God. Union is therefore not an isolated spiritual achievement; it is the culmination of a life being reordered toward God.

The book also describes the biblical ascent as involving a prior descent: the soul’s history includes both falling and rising. Origen read Israel’s history as an account of the fall and recovery of souls, and distinguished bodily, psychic, and spiritual ways of understanding Scripture. This layered interpretation places spiritual progress alongside the deepening interpretation of sacred texts. The Song of Songs, with its imagery of longing and intimacy, becomes especially suited to describing the final movement toward God.

Bernard of Clairvaux recasts the same progression as a sequence of kisses. The first is a kiss at Christ’s feet, associated with repentance and forgiveness; the second is a kiss of Christ’s hand, which lifts and guides the person through spiritual growth; the third is the kiss of Christ’s mouth, an intimacy marked by joy in God’s presence. Bernard’s image joins purgation, illumination, and union in a bodily metaphor, while insisting that the final kiss is not a mere greeting or figure of speech. It signifies the uniting of God with humanity. The sequence gives distinct meaning to confession, guidance, and contemplative repose rather than treating them as interchangeable experiences.

Intimacy, Grace, and the Limits of Knowledge

Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs repeatedly return to the kiss as the fulfillment of a longing soul. In his account, Christ the mediator makes communion with God possible, and the kiss strengthens faith. Yet the experience remains private in an important sense: those who have received it cannot make it fully intelligible to others. Its images of hidden nourishment and a sealed fountain stress both its reality to the recipient and the limits of explanation.

Meister Eckhart locates union in the relation between the ground of God and the ground of the soul. He calls the ground the hidden depth of God and the innermost depth of the soul, and describes mystical experience as their unity. His formulation, “God’s ground and my ground is the same ground,” expresses an intimacy more radical than intellectual understanding alone. Eckhart connects this possibility to the Word’s descent into human nature and the human ascent toward God: because God took on human nature, human beings can become one with God. His account is not simply a claim that a person comprehends God; it points to a unity that exceeds ordinary distinctions while remaining rooted in Christian language about the Word.

John of Ruusbroec likewise describes union as a meeting in love that surpasses the creaturely condition. In The Spiritual Espousals, the call to go out and meet the Bridegroom leads, in his account, to savoring the riches that flow from the hidden depths of the spirit. He associates the highest blessedness with an embrace of essential unity, and his closing benediction asks divine love for this gift, which turns no beggar away. His language of an ineffable abyss emphasizes that the meeting is approached through the inward life, yet cannot be reduced to an explanation of how God and the person relate.

Different Modes of Encounter

Ruusbroec’s The Sparkling Stone presents union through four related experiences. The person first receives God’s grace, including love and forgiveness, while cooperating through free will, interior fervor, penance, devotion, and love toward others. The person may then experience being embraced by God through a simple gaze beyond reason. In a third mode, transformation in God is described as being swallowed up in the abyss of blessedness. But when the experience is analyzed, the distinction between God and the person becomes apparent again; God remains incomprehensible, and the soul is drawn into renewed longing. The progression holds together grace, human response, transforming intimacy, and the return of desire when thought tries to contain what has been experienced.

The book’s accounts of religious practice give these inward descriptions a communal setting without making every moving worship experience equivalent to mystical union. In the late 1950s, a Protestant seminary student encountered the Gregorian chant of about 250 monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani and was deeply touched. The class visits, organized by church-history professor Bard Thompson, included the Divine Offices, meals, a monastery tour, and discussion of monastic life. The silence and warmth of the community made monasticism visible as a living practice. Thomas Merton joined two of the afternoons, answering visitors’ questions patiently; this encounter forms part of the book’s wider reflection on contemplative life, not a definition of union itself.

From Inner Experience to Shared Life

Other examples show how spiritual experience may take communal form. During a Quaker relief-planning meeting, Douglas Steere recalled that a brief prayer and another participant’s prayer were followed by an experience of release, tears, closeness to those present, and the perception that two others shared the experience. His account links inward certainty with fellowship in a particular gathering. He also valued silent Quaker worship, where participants waited to speak unless moved by the Holy Spirit; he observed that such silence could soften a barrier between members and begin a movement toward asking forgiveness.

Howard Thurman brought silence and meditation into chapel worship at Howard University, alongside liturgical dance and staged presentations of living Madonnas. In one service, six European Madonna paintings were reproduced by living participants behind a large frame, with silence between displays and Ave Maria played for each. Thurman described congregation and participants as joined in a moment of spiritual transcendence, and concluded that unity among peoples could be more compelling than what divided them. The example extends the book’s treatment of union from the individual soul’s intimacy with God to a worshipping community’s experience of togetherness.

The book also distinguishes such culmination from the longer processes that prepare a person for spiritual change. Augustine’s conversion followed extended searching and inner conflict; hearing about desert monks helped bring him to Paul’s letter to the Romans, and the passage he read was followed by relief and a change of life. The account presents grace, rather than intellectual probing alone, as decisive, and describes his later conversion as opening the possibility of celibacy and a more mystical life. This framing makes union neither an instant reward nor simply another name for conversion. It is the culmination of a gradual spiritual journey, received rather than mastered, and expressed in lives increasingly turned toward God and toward others.