Totality: The Requirement for Union with God

Totality...a strong word. A radical word. One that either sets the heart ablaze with eager zeal or makes it shrink back trembling at the demands it makes. Or perhaps a mix of both.

Since my teen years, having immersed myself in reading the works of the saints and spiritual classics, I desired totality in my spiritual life. There was a burning desire to give completely of myself; anything less felt like lukewarmness, tepidity, and mediocrity.

For many years, I thought this desire was to be fulfilled in entering religious life, making the ultimate gift of self in offering my whole life solely to God's service.

Yet in the years following my discernment out of the Carmelite monastery, this thirst for radical totality in my relationship with God has never left me.

I have wrestled with it. I have struggled to understand it. I have questioned it as perhaps a scrupulous urge to hold myself to some higher standard than I see other quite good Catholics living.

And yet the more and more I learn of union with God, the more I learn of Carmelite spirituality, the more I learn about what it is to live monastically in the world, there is always one thing in bold, italic, underlined print: totality. 

For one who is seeking union with God, seeking to live in His Presence and to enter into contemplative prayer, there is no room for compromise with the things of this world. St. John of the Cross speaks of "the way of the nothing," in which the soul strips itself of all things that are not God.

As I seek to live this radical totality, I easily tend to focus on the bigger things that must be uprooted from my heart if God alone is to remain. But totality includes both the small and the great things.

And so I begin to examine myself and ask, "Where am I refusing totality in the small things? How am I holding onto myself and my will in the hundred little occurrences of my daily life?

My friends, as St. Francis of Assisi said, "Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, that He Who gives Himself totally to you may receive you totally!" 

Let us not be those that let fear hold us back from this totality, but rather let us earnestly and ardently strive to give ourselves entirely to God, knowing that it is only by doing so that we can enter into full union with Him.