Union with God

Union with God is the mystic’s hope for intimate contact with the Divine, a relationship the book presents as received rather than produced. It is not simply an extraordinary sensation or a private escape from the world. Across accounts of medieval visionaries and modern religious figures, union involves a reorientation of the self: attention turns toward God, self-importance recedes, and inward devotion becomes a source of love, endurance, and service. The experiences differ, but they converge on the conviction that divine presence can transform how a person lives among others.

Meaning and the Shape of Union

The book distinguishes the search for God from the pursuit of ecstatic states. Mystics long to know that God exists and believe that human beings may come into contact with the Divine; at the deepest level, they hope for oneness or union. Yet the experience cannot be conjured up. The account therefore frames union less as a spiritual achievement than as a gift of love, to which a person may become receptive. Love of God and a loving disposition open the person to the God who is Love, while self-denial loosens the habits that keep the self at the center.

This inward movement need not erase human distinctness. Dag Hammarskjöld understood faith as God’s marriage to the soul and described prayer as descending into oneself to meet the Other. In his formulation, the encounter brings the person to see that all things, like oneself, stand alone before God. He also believed the individual to be strongest when attention rests on God, because God is within the person and the person is in God. The apparent paradox is central: the self becomes free not through self-assertion, but through surrender of the self that seeks to possess or control spiritual life.

Detachment, Attention, and the Inner Life

Meister Eckhart gives this inward transformation a developmental shape. His six stages begin with living by the example of good people, despite one’s imperfections, and then turning toward God in search of divine wisdom. As the person advances, fear and care lose their hold, love becomes a sustaining force, and the person learns to endure opposition, temptation, and sorrow. Later stages bring peace and quiet reliance on God’s gifts. At the sixth, the person is free of images, experiences an oblivion of time, and becomes God’s child; the final end of the inner person is eternal life.

Eckhart’s teaching of the ground of the soul describes the depth at which this change becomes possible. That ground, he taught, is untouched by anything other than God. When God’s ground and the human ground come together, the mystical life flourishes. The seeker must relinquish inadequate images and ideas of God, coming to know God through unknowing rather than treating concepts as if they could contain the Divine. For Eckhart, the answer to where God is to be sought lies deep within the soul. His preaching of detachment and mystical union reached friars, nuns, beguines, and ordinary listeners across Germany and parts of Switzerland.

Hammarskjöld’s account makes the difficulty of this inward approach explicit. He described himself as standing at the frontier of the unheard-of, drawn toward an encounter but instinctively and intellectually afraid to enter it. The image he used was a deep-sea dive: a plunge into a reality he did not know how to approach. His reflections on prayer describe this descent as a meeting with God within, and his work, though not publicly understood in these terms, was grounded in his own mystical experience. In a journal entry from Pentecost 1961, he recalled answering yes to an unknown questioner at an unknown moment. That answer gave his life a goal and led him to accept a path on which triumph and catastrophe could not be neatly separated.

Mystical Experience and Its Limits

The book does not treat every visionary experience as identical to union. Hildegard of Bingen reported that in 1141 a brilliant fiery light penetrated her brain and heart and gave her immediate knowledge of the Bible. She understood the experience as a call to prophetic work: teaching, preaching, interpreting Scripture, and proclaiming God’s justice. Her visions occurred while she was awake and alert, and their public consequence was reforming speech. This example places mystical encounter beside prophetic vocation without collapsing the two into one category.

Eckhart’s teachings likewise show how easily claims about inward union could become a matter of institutional dispute. He defended himself against heresy charges, distinguishing intellectual error from the willful adherence that he considered heresy. After his death, a papal bull judged seventeen of the twenty-eight articles against him heretical and others marked by heresy; the pope also stated that Eckhart had professed orthodox faith at the end of his life and revoked and deplored the articles he had preached. The controversy did not extinguish his popularity or the appeal of his teaching that people could realize an inner union with God. His case reveals the tension between a mystic’s claims about inward knowledge and the Church’s concern that such ideas might be misunderstood by uneducated listeners.

Union in Relationships and Social Action

For Howard Thurman, spiritual experience could appear as a profound meeting across religious and cultural divisions. During his 1935 pilgrimage in India, he first faced a challenge in Ceylon from a college principal who asked how an African American Christian could remain loyal to a faith associated with slavery, segregation, lynching, and racial violence. Thurman distinguished Christianity as historically practiced from the religion of Jesus, and answered with a critique of slavery and prejudice. The conversation lasted more than five hours. Later, in India, he and a university scholar recognized that their morning discussion of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity had become a contest between positions. When they returned to conversation that afternoon, Thurman experienced what he described as a profound fusion of religious experience: two spirits meeting beyond social, political, and cultural frames while remaining individuals. Union here did not mean sameness; it meant communion without the disappearance of difference.

Dorothy Day located divine presence not primarily in an extraordinary vision but in the poor people who came to the Catholic Worker house for food and shelter. She believed Christ was present in them and in the bread shared together. That conviction shaped a demanding practice of hospitality toward people who might be difficult to help, and it made care for the wounded inseparable from efforts to change the conditions that produced suffering. Day’s work gives social form to the book’s account of love: spiritual commitment is tested in practical relations, not only in inward feeling. Her insistence that the guest could be Christ made the encounter with the poor a place where divine presence was recognized and answered.

The same connection between inward life and outward conduct appears in Hammarskjöld’s reading of the mystics. He understood self-surrender as a way to self-realization, and inwardness as a source of strength to meet neighbors’ needs and accept the demands of life. The mystics’ love, in this account, expressed itself in the fulfillment of duty and in acceptance of toil, suffering, or happiness. Union therefore does not remove a person from responsibility; it can deepen the capacity to respond.

Christ, the Self, and the Common Ground

Thomas Merton gives this transformation an explicitly Christian account. He defined transcendent experience as self-transcending together with an experience of the Transcendent, the Absolute, or God, encountered not merely as an object but as Subject. The self left behind is the false, ego-centered self, not the person’s reality in every sense. Merton understood the experience as grounded in Christ or the Holy Spirit within, so that the mystic identifies with Christ. The Pauline statement “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” expresses this change: union is not simply the ego’s disappearance, but a life understood as identified with Christ.

The book’s examples thus resist a single outward definition of union with God. It may be described as marriage of the soul, discovery of a ground within, surrender of the ego, prophetic illumination, or a spiritual meeting between people of different traditions. These forms are not interchangeable: Hildegard’s alert visions and prophetic mission, Eckhart’s teaching on detachment, Thurman’s interreligious encounter, and Day’s hospitality carry different meanings and consequences. Their shared emphasis is that divine contact is not possessed at will. It is received as love, and its credibility is made visible in transformed attention, humility, fidelity, and care for other people.