The Union of Love

Extract

Love of Christ, like all other love, tends toward union, onlymore powerfully since the spring of it is grace and is the perfection and summit of love. This is the mysterious fact, mysterious in its manner rather than in its accomplishment. In the Mahayana form of Buddhism all men are supposed to be called to a kind of union which merges their whole personality into the divine being, a kind of union which goes even beyond the hypostatic union in which the manhood of Christ was united to God in the divine Person of the Son. This Eastern conception has great attraction to some Western minds as an interpretation of Christ's personality and our uplifting. They say he acquired unity with God at the Baptism in Jordan, as though a man became God, and not God became man; that we too in our measure could be caught up into this unity. But this is heresy.