Spiritual Marriage and the Extension of Christ’s Saving Work in the World
Summary: Union with Christ is not a state of passive tranquility or withdrawal from the world. Rather, it constitutes an active participation in Christ’s redemptive mission. This article argues that authentic union necessarily impels the soul toward the world of darkness and death, to prolong and apply Christ’s saving work to humanity. Through theological analysis rooted in Scripture, the Fathers, and the Carmelite tradition, we demonstrate that the soul united to Christ becomes an instrument of purification for others, bearing within itself the Holy Spirit as an interior source of living water. The sending that flows from union represents a deepening insertion into Christ’s own movement toward sinners. The article concludes that true union with God inaugurates active participation in salvation itself.
Introduction
There exists a profound misunderstanding of the spiritual life within certain contemplative traditions. Some regard union with God as a kind of serene arrival, a tranquil settling into eternal rest. This view carries the weight of escapism: the mystical life understood as flight from the world. Yet Christ is unambiguous: The servant is not greater than the master (Jn 13:16). Union does not elevate one above Christ; it introduces one into his work.
God does not rest at a distance. Rather, God went down—to Egypt, to the cross, into the very depths of human darkness and death. The soul that becomes truly united to Christ participates in this descent, this movement, this mission of redemption. The purpose of this article is to articulate this conviction: union with Christ has a clear goal—not self-absorption, but apostolic extension. It is the opening of a new space in the world where redemption unfolds.
Through Scripture, the Fathers, and the witness of the Carmelite saints, we shall trace the logic of this sending—how the soul, made capable by union with Christ of bearing the Holy Spirit as an interior source, becomes an instrument of salvation for others, prolonging in the world the saving work that Christ completed and continues to unfold.
The Outstretched Arm: Divine Saving Action in History
The Acts of the Apostles opens our inquiry into the nature of redemption. In Acts 13, Saint Paul addresses the Hebrews in the synagogue and rehearses the history of the chosen people. After long years in Egyptian slavery, Paul declares: “God led them out with an outstretched arm”.
This is not merely an image of divine power. The phrase echoes Isaiah 53:1: “To whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” This question appears in the fourth Servant Song, prophesying the Passion of Christ. In Scripture, the arm of God is the concrete manifestation of his saving action in history. It is not abstract force. It is the living, intervening presence of God going forth to rescue, to liberate, to redeem.
This is crucial for understanding redemption itself. God does not save from a distance. He does not execute salvation from an unreachable throne and leave it at that. Rather, his saving action is characterised by descent, by approach, by the coming near of his arm. The arm speaks of proximity, of contact, of the hand reaching down into the mire. And this pattern—established in the Exodus—reaches its fulfilment in the Passion, where Christ stretches out his arms on the cross, bringing the Exodus gesture to its ultimate meaning.
The Two Hands of the Father: Irenaeus and the Mystery of Recapitulation
To understand the full depth of this saving action, we turn to Saint Irenaeus, whose insight illuminates the very mystery we are exploring. Irenaeus speaks of the two hands of the Father: the Son and the Holy Spirit. This is not mere rhetoric. It expresses a profound truth about how God operates in the work of redemption.
When we speak of the arm of the Lord, we are speaking, in Irenean terms, of these two hands working together. The Son and the Spirit are not two separate forces; they are the Father’s two means of relating to his creation. And what do these hands do? They do not merely repair the damage done by sin. They recreate.
Irenaeus implicitly employs an image of great power: the potter who takes up clay that has been spoiled in the making. The potter does not simply patch it. Rather, he takes up the entire vessel and refashions it. The hands knead the clay, reshape it, remake it. This is the work that the two hands of the Father—Son and Spirit—accomplish. They take up the whole man—the old man marked by sin, and the man in becoming, in potency—in order to refashion him entirely.
Notice that Irenaeus says God built the woman from the rib of Adam (Gen 2:22). The verb is the same as in Genesis: built. This is not repair. This is new creation. The hands of the Father are creative hands. They do not work with diminishment or reduction. They work with the fullness of their creative power. And this is the pattern of salvation: God saves us by taking up the whole of us—body, soul, spirit—and recreating us from within.
Note: The image of God as a potter appears most explicitly in the prophetic literature, where it serves to express both divine sovereignty and the mysterious freedom of God’s action in forming His people. The principal passage is found in the Book of Jeremiah, where the prophet is sent to observe a potter at work. In Jeremiah 18, the scene is not merely illustrative but revelatory: God uses a concrete, almost contemplative experience to communicate a theological truth about His relationship with Israel. “Then the word of the Lord came to me: ‘Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.’ So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: ‘Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.’” (Jeremiah 18:5–6) This passage is central because it links the act of divine formation with the possibility of re-formation: the clay that is “spoiled” is not discarded but reshaped. It suggests a dynamic understanding of God’s action, attentive to the response of the people. A closely related, though more concise, expression appears earlier in Jeremiah, where the same analogy is used in a more confessional tone: “But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” (Isaiah 64:8) Here, the image becomes a prayer, acknowledging dependence and belonging. It shifts from observation (as in Jeremiah 18) to interior assent. Finally, the theme is echoed in a more polemical context in Isaiah 29, where the prophet rebukes those who invert the proper order between Creator and creature: “You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? Shall the thing made say of its maker, ‘He did not make me’?” (Isaiah 29:16)
Taken together, these texts show that the “potter” image is not incidental. It belongs to a broader prophetic pedagogy in which God forms, corrects, and reshapes His people, while always respecting the mystery of their response.
The Passion as the Summit: The Full Deployment of the Two Hands
The mystery of the two hands of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, reaches its summit in the Passion. It is there, in those decisive hours, that the Father fully deploys his two hands. It is there that we find the place and the moment of the unfolding of the saving power of God—not metaphorically, but concretely, visibly, in the flesh of the Son.
Christ stretches out his arms on the cross, fulfilling the Exodus motif: he brings to fulfilment that outstretched arm of the God who led Israel through the wilderness. Further, his soul mystically is taken by the Holy Spirit to be united to the people who walk in the darkness, crossing therefore the abyss that separates the Divine Life of God and the land of death and separation from God. And at the same time, through the Holy Spirit, he reaches man at the very lowest point. The arms of Christ, extended on the cross, are the arms of God reaching down into the abyss.
The Washing of the Feet
First let us see the exegesis of the Passage of John 13, the Washing of the Feet.
John 13 does not function as a simple moral vignette about humility. It is a carefully constructed symbolic action placed by the evangelist at the threshold of the Passion, and it already contains—under sacramental and prophetic form—the whole logic of the Cross. The narrative is dense with anticipatory correspondences: what is enacted in gesture here will be realised in blood and water in chapters 18–19.
The evangelist himself signals this interpretative horizon from the opening line. “Before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” (John 13:1). The expression “his hour” is the Johannine technical term for the Passion-glorification. The foot washing is therefore not an isolated act; it belongs to that “hour” and must be read as a revelation of its inner meaning. The phrase “to the end” (eis telos) carries both the sense of totality and completion; it anticipates the cry of the Cross, “It is finished” (tetelestai, John 19:30). The same root (telos) binds the beginning of chapter 13 to the consummation of chapter 19.
The structure of the action itself mirrors, in a strikingly deliberate way, the movement of the Incarnation and the Passion. “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.” (John 13:3–4). The sequence is theological. The consciousness of divine origin and destiny (“from God… to God”) does not lead to self-assertion but to self-emptying. The gesture of laying aside the outer garment has long been read as a sign of kenosis: the voluntary “laying down” of what is his. Later in the Gospel, Jesus will say explicitly, “I lay down my life” (John 10:17). The same verb and logic are at work. After the washing, “he put on his robe again” (John 13:12), which parallels the taking up of life again in the Resurrection: “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again” (John 10:18). The entire Paschal movement—descent and return—is thus inscribed in the choreography of the scene.
The washing itself carries a soteriological density that goes beyond mere example. When Peter resists, Jesus responds with a statement that links the gesture to salvation: “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” (John 13:8). The expression “no share” (meros) indicates participation, communion in his destiny. The washing is therefore not simply ethical imitation but participation in the redemptive act that will culminate on the Cross. Peter’s misunderstanding allows Jesus to clarify the distinction between a fundamental cleansing and a secondary one: “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean.” (John 13:10). The tradition has often seen here an allusion to the distinction between the decisive purification given by Christ (ultimately in his death) and the ongoing purification needed in the believer’s walk. In Johannine terms, it resonates with the later scene where “blood and water” flow from the pierced side (John 19:34), which the Fathers interpret as the sacramental outpouring of cleansing and life.
The humility of the act is not an isolated virtue but the very form taken by divine love in redemption. The evangelist notes the presence of betrayal: “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas… to betray him.” (John 13:2). The washing takes place in the immediate proximity of treachery. This juxtaposition anticipates the Passion, where love and betrayal coexist. Moreover, Jesus washes the feet of Judas as well; the gesture therefore includes even the one who will hand him over. In this sense, the act prefigures the universal scope of redemption, offered even where it is refused.
The command that follows—“I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (John 13:15)—must be read within this deeper horizon. The term “example” (hypodeigma) does not reduce the act to moralism; it establishes a form of life grounded in participation in Christ’s own self-giving. The disciples are not simply to reproduce an external gesture but to enter into the same movement of self-emptying love that reaches its climax on the Cross. This is confirmed a few verses later: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34). The measure is not generic charity but the specific love that is about to be manifested in the Passion: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13).
There is also a priestly and sacrificial undertone. Although John does not recount the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, chapter 13 functions in part as its theological counterpart. The self-gift symbolised in the washing corresponds to the self-gift expressed in the Synoptic words over the bread and wine. What is enacted in sign here will be made present sacramentally and accomplished historically on Calvary. The “service” (diakonia) of Jesus is not ancillary; it is the very mode of his priesthood, fulfilled when he offers himself “for” others.
Finally, the descent motif of the washing finds its culmination at the Cross in a literal and visible way. Jesus, stripped of his garments (John 19:23–24), is raised on the Cross yet in radical abasement. From his side flows the definitive purification. The one who “came from God and was going to God” returns to the Father precisely through this path of self-emptying love. The foot washing, read in this light, is a prophetic sign-act: it interprets the Passion before it happens and provides the key for understanding it afterwards.
In summary, John 13 condenses in symbolic form the entire mystery of redemption. The laying aside and taking up of garments parallels death and resurrection; the washing anticipates the cleansing power of the Cross; the inclusion of Judas foreshadows the drama of betrayal within redeeming love; and the command to imitate establishes the Church’s participation in this same Paschal movement. The narrative is therefore not ancillary to the Passion account but intrinsically ordered to it, as its interior revelation.
The washing of the feet, Christ’s prophetic action on the eve of his Passion (Jn 13:14), becomes the sign and seal of this descent. By going as far as the feet—to the lowest part of man, into what is poorest, most obscure, most defiled—Christ announces what his Passion will accomplish. He will descend into the lowest parts of the human condition, into death itself, in order to purify the whole man. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. The gesture becomes a command. It inscribes itself into the very logic of redemption.
For what Christ does in the Passion is not merely rescue from afar. It is solidarity at the deepest level. He enters into darkness that he might dispel it. He takes upon himself the condition of sinners that sinners might be transformed. This is the full meaning of the two hands of the Father: creative hands reaching down into the abyss, kneading the clay of humanity itself from within its brokenness, remaking it from the ground up.
Union and Configuration: The Soul Made Capable of Christ’s Work
Now we arrive at a crucial threshold. If the Passion is the summit of God’s saving action, the question emerges: what is the place of the human being in this mystery? What does it mean for the human being to be united to Christ?
The great Carmelite reformer, St. Teresa of Ávila, offers a response of characteristic clarity. In her account of the seventh mansion—the place of spiritual marriage—Teresa warns forcefully against the illusion that union is a place of rest separated from Christ’s work: Look carefully at the life of Christ and at the lives of those who were closest to him…what he did, that must be done (Interior Castle, Seventh Mansion, ch. 4:4)
This is the fundamental principle: union configures to Christ. It makes one capable of doing what he did. If he washed, then true union makes one capable of washing. If he descended into the darkness of human misery to bring healing, then the soul united to him participates in this descent. Union is not an escape from his work; it is an introduction into it. Union does not place one above Christ; it introduces one into his mission.
The soul that reaches union with Christ becomes, quite literally, reconfigured in the image of Christ. The soul’s very trajectory becomes aligned with Christ’s trajectory. The soul’s movement becomes a participation in his movement toward sinners, toward the lost, toward the darkness that he came to dispel.
Note: “It will be a good thing, sisters, if I tell you why it is that the Lord grants so many favours in this world. Although you will have learned this from the effects they produce, if you have observed them, I will speak about it further here, so that none of you shall think that He does it simply to give these souls pleasure. That would be to make a great error. For His Majesty can do nothing greater for us than grant us a life which is an imitation of that lived by His Beloved Son. I feel certain, therefore, that these favours are given us to strengthen our weakness, as I have sometimes said here, so that we may be able to imitate Him in His great sufferings.
We always find that those who walked closest to Christ Our Lord were those who had to bear the greatest trials. Consider the trials suffered by His glorious Mother and by the glorious Apostles. How do you suppose Saint Paul could endure such terrible trials? We can see in his life the effects of genuine visions and of contemplation coming from Our Lord and not from human imagination or from the deceit of the devil. Do you imagine that he shut himself up with his visions so as to enjoy those Divine favours and pursue no other occupation? You know very well that, so far as we can learn, he took not a day’s rest, nor can he have rested by night, since it was then that he had to earn his living.” (St. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, Seventh Mansion, 4,4)
Union as the Source of Mission: The Rivers of Living Water
But how does union to Christ translate into the soul’s capacity to carry out this mission? How does the mystical encounter with the divine bear fruit in apostolic action? The answer lies in understanding union not as a static state, but as a dynamic participation in the Holy Spirit.
Christ himself provides the image. In the Gospel of John, he declares: “He who believes in me, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (Jn 7:38). This is not merely the believer’s personal experience of the divine. It is a statement about fruitfulness, about the overflow of the divine life that the believer becomes.
This is the transformative power of union. Before union, the soul receives the Holy Spirit in a punctual manner. But in union with Christ, the Holy Spirit is no longer received only intermittently. He becomes, as it were, an interior source. The soul that has reached union possesses the Holy Spirit in a new way—not as an external gift, but as an indwelling presence that springs forth from within, like a fountain.
St. John of the Cross expresses this with theological boldness: the soul that has attained union possesses the Holy Spirit in the sense that it can truly communicate him; in giving him to God, it gives him as something that has become its own by participation. This is not inflation. It is the precise formulation of what mystical union accomplishes: the soul becomes so intimately joined to the source of the Spirit that the Spirit flows through it as though through an extension of Christ himself. St. John makes this bold statement: the soul gives God (the Holy Spirit) to whomever she wills.
From this understanding, the mission of the soul is clarified. The mission consists in pouring forth this living water—not in an external or mechanical way, but by allowing the action of the Spirit to spring forth to others. The soul becomes, quite literally, a “source” of the Spirit’s work in the world. And since the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the soul’s action is a participation in Christ’s own redemptive action.
The Sending: Participation in Christ’s Own Mission
Thus we arrive at the central figure of our reflection: the sending. The Church’s missionary mandate is not an external command imposed upon the faithful from without. Rather, it flows from the very logic of union itself.
Christ commands the apostles: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19). To understand this command, we must penetrate to its deeper meaning. To baptise does not merely mean performing an external rite. It is to communicate the purification that comes from God—the work of the two hands of the Father, the creative and transformative action that remakes man from within.
“Was it not in prayer that St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. John of the Cross, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, St. Dominic, and so many other famous Friends of God have drawn out this divine science which delights the greatest geniuses? A scholar has said: “Give me a lever and a, fulcrum and I will lift the world.”. What Archimedes was not able to obtain, for his request was not directed by God and was only made from a material viewpoint, the saints have obtained [36 v] in all its fullness. The Almighty has given them as fulcrum: HIMSELF ALONE; as lever: PRAYER which burns with a fire of love. And it is in this way that they have lifted the world; it is in this way that the saints still militant lift it, and that, until the end of time, the saints to come will lift it.” (St Therese of the Child Jesus, Autobiography, Ms C 36r°-v°)
For only the water of the Holy Spirit truly purifies. As Christ tells Nicodemus: Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God (Jn 3:5). The water here is not merely the material element; it is the sign and vehicle of the Spirit’s transformative power. And to baptise is to participate in this work—to communicate the transforming grace that remakes man. “But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is completed!” (Luke 12:50)
But Christ’s words carry still deeper resonance: As the Father has sent me, even so I send you (Jn 20:21). This is the paradigm. Christ was sent into the very depths of darkness, into the condition of sinners, into death itself: it was a baptism! He was baptised in us, being in the land of death and darkness. He did not remain at a distance from human misery. He descended into it, that he might transform it from within.
To be sent by Christ and to baptise, is to be sent in this same manner and “baptise”/cleanse as He did. It is to be plunged, following him, into the world marked by darkness—not as a place of fear or contamination, but as the very place where redemption unfolds. To be plunged and give the Holy Spirit, the very power of purification. To be sent is a movement of the heart, a participation in Christ’s own thrust toward the lost. The soul that is sent becomes, in a real sense, an extension of Christ’s Incarnate presence in the world.
Union Does Not Separate: Guarding Against Illusion
It is necessary to guard against a common illusion—one that has shaped certain misunderstandings of the spiritual life. There is a temptation to understand union with God as a peaceful settling, a tranquil summit. One might imagine the soul that reaches union as entering into a state of rest, serene and protected, separated from the turbulence and suffering of the world.
But Christ is unambiguous: “The servant is not greater than his master” (Jn 13:16). If Christ went to the cross, if his love took him into the abyss of human suffering and death, then the soul that is truly united to him cannot imagine itself as exempt from this movement. The soul does not rise above Christ’s work; it enters into it.
Union with God is not a place of rest separated from the world. It is the opening of a new space where redemption unfolds. The soul that reaches union finds itself not at the end of the journey, but at a new beginning—equipped now with the presence of the Holy Spirit as an interior source, capable of extending Christ’s redemptive work into the world. It is not a withdrawal into peace closed in upon itself, but a deeper insertion into the movement by which God goes in search of man even into the darkness.
This is the radical reversal that the Passion introduces into all human understanding of love and union. We tend to imagine love as drawing two beings away from the world, into a private communion. But Christ’s love does not work this way. His love goes forth into the darkness. It reaches down into the mire of human sin and suffering. And the soul that loves Christ, that is truly united to him, participates in this outward-moving, other-directed, redemptive love.
Active Participation in Salvation: Prolonging the Work of Redemption
We now perceive the deepest significance of union with Christ: it inaugurates an active participation in the saving action of God. This is not secondary to union; it flows necessarily from it.
It is true that Christ completed the work of redemption. The Paschal Mystery—his Passion, Death, and Resurrection—constitutes the definitive and unsurpassable act of salvation. It is finished (Jn 19:30), Christ declares from the cross. There is a finality to what he accomplished. The grace of salvation is complete in him. We add nothing to the intrinsic value or efficacy of his sacrificial work.
And yet—here is the paradox that the whole of Christian revelation opens before us—Christ wills that his salvation be extended through the agency of his body, the Church, and concretely through the souls of those who are united to him. He could have accomplished the application of his redemptive work through his own power alone. But he chose instead to associate his creatures with this work. He chose to make us participants in his redemptive action.
The soul that is united to Christ, therefore, receives a share in his mission. The union is not only for the soul’s own perfection or sanctification, but for the extension of Christ’s saving work into the world. The soul becomes, quite literally, an instrument through which Christ continues to pour forth his grace and redemptive power. It becomes capable of doing what he did: of descending into darkness, of communicating purification, of bearing witness to the love that goes to the lowest places and lifts them up.
This is what the ancient formula means: Christ wills to continue his Passion and Resurrection through his members. Not in the sense that the Passion needs to be repeated—it is eternally efficacious. But in the sense that its application to the world, its manifestation to souls caught in darkness, its communication of grace to those in need—all of this continues through the agency of the Church and individuals united to Christ. The soul that reaches union becomes an extension of Christ’s saving action in space and time. It becomes capable of prolonging, in its own limited way, the redemptive work that Christ undertook and completed once for all.
Note: Taking all the above into account, one can return—now with renewed insight—to the great passage of Thérèse, where she speaks of charity, or burning love, or burning prayer—indeed, simply the grace of God—as the very blood of the Church’s Body. The “pumping” of this blood is decisive. Every person can participate in it, provided there is a true transformation into the Fire. Likewise, when she says “my vocation”, this must be understood in a deeper sense: it is the foundation of all vocations, the hidden part of the iceberg underlying evangelisation, ministry, and all apostolic activity. Note in particular this expression in the text: “if Love ever became extinct”. It indicates that her vocation is precisely to be transformed into this Fire and to “pump” it into the rest of Christ’s Body, that is, the Church. Here is the passage:
“Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church had a body composed of different members [1 Co 12:14], the most necessary and most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and so I understood that the Church had a Heart and that this Heart was BURNING WITH LOVE. I understood it was Love alone that made the Church’s members act, that if Love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach the Gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood… I understood that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES… IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL!
Then, in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love… my vocation, at last I have found it: MY VOCATION IS LOVE!…” (St. Therese of the Child Jesus, Autobiography, Ms B, 3 v)
Note: For a deeper exploration of the “how”, please refer to the following articles: Mary’s Fiery Prayer , and A Mysterious Warfare . Further articles on this subject can be found here: The Redemptive Mission
Conclusion: The Mission as the Fruit of Union
We have traced, through Scripture and the witness of the Church’s great teachers, the logic that binds union with Christ to the soul’s mission in the world. What emerges is a vision of the spiritual life fundamentally at odds with escapism or withdrawal. Union does not place the soul in a refuge apart from the world. It places the soul at the heart of Christ’s redemptive work.
The journey of the soul toward union with Christ is not a journey away from the world, but toward a deeper participation in the work that Christ undertakes within it. The outstretched arm of God, which reaches down in the Exodus to liberate Israel, which stretches out on the cross to embrace all humanity, continues its work through the extended arms of those united to Christ. The two hands of the Father—Son and Holy Spirit—work through the hands of redeemed and sanctified souls to refashion creation itself.
The soul united to Christ becomes capable of bearing the Holy Spirit as an interior fountain. From that fountain flow rivers of living water—the grace and purification and love of Christ himself, communicated through the whole of the soul’s existence. The soul becomes an instrument of purification for others, a bearer of light in darkness, a participant in the redemptive action of God.
Thus the mission received from Christ—Go therefore and make disciples (Mt 28:19)—is not an external command imposed upon the soul after it has reached union. It is the natural and necessary fruit of union itself. To be sent is to be borne by Christ and by the Spirit, to be introduced into their movement toward sinners, toward the lost, toward all those in whom redemption has not yet begun to unfold.
And finally, this mission takes on its full depth: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you” (Jn 20:21). The soul that receives this sending participates, however humbly and limitedly, in the very extension of salvation in the world. It becomes, in a real sense, a continuation of the Incarnation—the Word made flesh now continuing to make himself present, his redemptive love continuing to unfold, through the agency of souls united to him.
Union with Jesus, therefore, is never a destination where the soul rests. It is always a new beginning, an opening of a new space, a sending forth. It inaugurates active participation in the saving action of God. And in this participation, the soul discovers its true destiny: not a withdrawal into peace closed in upon itself, but a deeper insertion into the movement by which God goes in search of man even into the darkness, even unto death and beyond, that all might be recreated, redeemed, made whole.
Read also:
The Perfect Contemplative Prayer of Christ, chapter from “Where the Spirit Breathes, Prayer and Action”. (see the video of the talk on this chapter)
Further articles on this subject can be found here: The Redemptive Mission
Bibliography
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.
John of the Cross, Saint. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. ICS Publications, 1991.
Pozo, Candido. Mystical Theology of Saint John of the Cross. Edited by Augustine Townsend. Sheed and Ward, 1957.
Teresa of Avila, Saint. The Interior Castle. Translated by E. Allison Peers. Image Books, 1961.
Holy Bible. The New American Bible (U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2010) and Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (Ignatius Press, 1965).
Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 13:16-23.
Gospel of John: Jn 1:1, 3:5, 7:38, 13:14-16, 19:30, 20:21.
Gospel of Matthew: Mt 10:40, 28:19.
Book of Genesis: Gen 2:22.
Book of Isaiah: Isa 53:1.