Contemplating the Lord's Prayer: A Prayerful Mutuality and Nonduality

In the world of Christianity, perhaps the most prominent, widely practiced, and highly cherished prayer is the Lord’s Prayer, also known as Our Father. This prayer was taught directly by Jesus Christ to his disciples who asked him how to pray to God. As John Paul Thomas writes in his chapter on the Lord’s Prayer from a Catholic perspective:

The Lord’s Prayer is, indeed, a summary of the entire Gospel.  It is called “The Lord’s Prayer” in that Jesus Himself gave it to us as a way of teaching us to pray.  In this prayer, we find seven petitions to God.  Within those seven petitions, we will find every human longing and every expression of faith found within the Scriptures.  Everything we need to know about life and prayer is contained in the wonderful prayer.

Jesus Himself gave us this prayer as the model of all prayer.  It is good that we repeat the words of the Lord’s Prayer regularly in vocal prayer.  This is also done in the various sacraments and liturgical worship.  However, saying this prayer is not enough.  The goal is to internalize each and every aspect of this prayer so that it becomes a model of our personal petition to God and an entrustment of our entire life to Him.[1]

An examination of the Lord’s Prayer shows just how comprehensive and profound the content of this prayer really is. It is a prayer that can be read on many levels. Most obviously, the surface meaning of this prayer is exalted and divinely oriented with Jesus’s own exhortation for his disciples to place God at the heart and summit of their lives. From a contemplative perspective, deeper and riches meanings can be gleaned. Such meanings become apparent when we can savour the words of the Prayer with the eyes of contemplation. This means that we apply not just our intellect and reasoning to the task of reading the Prayer, but that we encounter the text of the Prayer with the hermeneutic of contemplation. Here, we learn to read beyond the words to touch deeper meanings.

This hermeneutic of contemplation is an interpretive lens formed by deep contemplative practice and experience. It enables us to read the text of the Prayer with a spiritually attuned and mystically alive orientation that is not content to leave our understandings at the cognitive level. Instead, we dive deeper into the mystery of the living Word beyond the words that is spiritually charged, semantically fertile, and existentially life-giving in unexpected ways. We do this by means of a contemplative awareness and sensitivity honed by intensive and sustained contemplative practice.

In this essay, I will explore the verdant contemplative truths hidden in the Lord’ Prayer, waiting to be discovered by all who seek deeper insights for an ever deepening spirituality leading towards the fullness of Christ in our being. In so doing, I will draw upon the insights of Christian mystics such as the Dominican Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) and the renowned Carmelites St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), as well as modern Christian contemplatives such as Fr. Thomas Merton, OCSO (1915-1968) and Fr. John Main, OSB (1926-1982). I will also be drawing on my own contemplative studies and experience to parse the Lord’ Prayer, with the intention of paving the way to a deeper understanding of this most important spiritual treasure.

Before delving deeper into the Lord’s Prayer, here is the Bible passage on it:

Pray then in this way:

Our Father in heaven,    

hallowed be your name.     

Your kingdom come.    

Your will be done,        

on earth as it is in heaven.   

Give us this day our daily bread.    

And forgive us our debts,        

as we also have forgiven our debtors.   

And do not bring us to the time of trial,         

but rescue us from the evil one.

Matthew 6:9-13 (NRSV-CE)

New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition

Dimensions of Reality

When seeking to interpret texts, we can do so on different levels. This means that we acknowledge the possibility of interpreting texts beyond their literal and apparent level. At the very least, we can speak of the relative and ultimate levels of interpretation. Relative is the more surface conventional understanding of the text in question, the textual meanings derived from only a cursory analysis in a more or less literal fashion. Ultimate is a deeper analysis of textual meanings that seek to unpack hidden or less obvious readings. Such readings can stem from deeper contemplative experience or spiritual intuition that takes us beyond the words into the experiential realities behind those words.

On a relative level, as we read and pray the Lord’s Prayer, we may think of it as a symphony of different prayer acts: adoration (“Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name.”); supplication (“Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”); petition (“Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors.”); and final petition (“And do not bring us to the time of trial but rescue us from the evil one.”) This sequential movement of prayer starts with worshipping God for his own sake and moves progressively towards assisting humanity in their needs and requests. Onto-epistemologically, there is a separation between the one who prays and the God to whom is prayed. God and humanity are thus exemplifying a relationship of “severalness,” where the term “severalness” described exactly this kind of ontological and empirical separation between God and humanity. Ontology concerns what is real and true, what exists truly. This is metaphysical in nature. Epistemology concerns what we know and how we know what we know. This is empirical in nature.

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name.” This opening line is a sign of adoration, which can be read from a perspective of “severalness” and that of “jointness.”[2] In the several, we see and feel ourselves as humble worshippers of God praising and adoring him for who he is, from a distance that can be long or short depending on the level of intimacy. In the joint, we see a nondual inseparability of God and us, as we enter and melt into the scintillating glory of God whose heavenly limitlessness and our earthly limitedness cannot be demarcated so easily. This joint relationality is a sign of significantly deep intimacy. Carmelite mystic St. Theresa of Avila writes about contemplative prayer as a unitive experience beyond all self-driven ambition and unachievable by self-effort. She describes this degree of quietness and naked knowing that comes with contemplation thus:

This prayer is something supernatural, something we cannot procure through our own efforts. In it the soul enters into peace or, better, the Lord puts it at peace by his presence, as he did to the just Simeon. So that all the faculties are calmed. The soul understands in another way, very foreign to the way it understands understands through the exterior senses, that it is now close to its God and that not much would be required for it to become one with him in union.[3]

“Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” On an ultimate level, we can view God and his kingdom not as inherently separated and isolated from humanity but as the deepest, richest, and most profound dimension of experience that humanity is capable of. In the Lord’s Prayer, God as our Father is not distant but intimate with us, so intimate that we can even say that we are empirically nondual. All this is made possible and certain by the person-event of Jesus Christ whose incarnation into creation and perfect finished work at the cross incorporated humanity and creation into the very triune being of God. As such, the holiness and sanctity of God becomes self-luminously present in the here and now. The phrase “your kingdom come” points to the deep unity of the divine and creaturely dimensions, the nonduality that lies at the heart of the cosmos and reality. This is so not because the created order is ontologically one with God or made out of God’s very own being. Rather, this is so because in nondual consciousness, the divine reality of the triune God has so penetrated into and suffused the experience of the one who prays that there is no demarcation between doing the will of God “in heaven” and doing so “on earth.” The experience of heaven (timeless reality) has already entered earth (historical reality), making every moment and every experienced content a timeless experience of nondual joy and freedom.

Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart speaks of this nondual experience of human being and God’s Being in terms of gazing into one’s spirit to become united with the Spirit of God:

If we are to become worthy to receive the Holy Spirit, then we should act as the uncreated spirit of God acts. We should turn the eyes of our intellect into ourselves and should gaze upon the excellence of our spiritual being (as we are formed in the image of the Holy Trinity after which we were created), having been created in order to become united with the uncreated Spirit of God. As we then gaze upon the riches of our own self, as we are meant to be, we should delight in its wealth with the self, from which there should grow in us so great a desire and such great pleasure that we can never seek fullness or desire in any other place. Thus, we should act as the uncreated Spirit of God acts. … You should know your own self-reflection inwardly, so that you are not yourself in anything but only in the highest good. We should see with reason and with knowledge. And so, the seer, the creator and the image-maker must be stripped bare, as the hand of God is bare. What is the hand of God? It is the power of God that is active on account of his eternal work. Thus, we should know God with invisible light and should abandon all that is not God.^[4]

One important caveat: in biblical Christianity—whether Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Eastern Orthodox—the notion of nonduality does not collapse into a sort of ontological indifferentism. Simply put, Christian nonduality is not to be conflated with nonduality of the Vedantic or New Age kind. In the Indic philosophical system of Advaita Vedanta, the cosmos and all experienced realities are none other than the singular substance of atman or brahman, the pure consciousness of spirit that is indelibly one without any other. It is philosophical monism, an essentialist view of uncompromising ontological oneness. Similarly for many New Age systems of thought that can be traced back to the more ancient Advaita Vedanta—they are also monistic in nature. Christian nonduality is not monistic at all. Nor is it dualistic, as is commonly misconstrued.

Rather, Christian nonduality transcends the binary of monism and dualism, embracing a dynamic integral wholeness of experience without collapsing into non-falsifiable ontological assumptions of monism and dualism. Christian nonduality can be described in my view as devotional nonduality, wherein the one who worships and the One who is worshipped are entwined in a mutuality of intimate loving union that transcends categories of ontological substantialism, essentialism, and nihilism. One helpful maxim to describe this is: “not one, not two.” In addition, we can also say: “empty yet ineffably present.” In my other essays, I have parsed the ontological status of the Christian God, who is a triune God, as one of “holy emptiness” and “ineffable presence.”

The triune God of the Christian tradition rooted in scripture is thus empty of all notions of inherent existence and non-inherent (or contingent) existence; and yet can be said to be ineffably present in a way that transcends these same categories. This is not easy to understand but nonetheless significant for our reading of the Lord’s Prayer. Just know this: when we pray for the Lord’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, we are not conflating the world of history with the reality of divine consciousness in a monistic sense, as many Asian traditions and New Age ideologies are wont to do. No, that would be to commit a fallacy and an ontological error. Instead, we must be careful to realize that our nondual prayer of oneness of the divine and the historical are rooted in biblical notions of wholeness and integrity, where God’s holy emptiness and ineffable presence stands in distinction from the empty contingency of the cosmos and life. Ontologically, God and creation are not one and not two in any inherent sense but must nevertheless be distinguished in a real sense beyond notions of inherency. God is not creation and creation is not God; but God while empty is ineffably present in each moment of reality and experience.

Hence, God’s kingdom “descending” onto earth points to the nondual experience of God’s ineffable presence in every moment and event of our lives, pervading all of cosmic reality without remainder. God is transcendent yet pervasively suffuses every quark, superstring, electron, proton, neutron, molecule, chemical, plasma, cell, tissue, organ, inanimate entity, and living being in this cosmos without exception. God is in every situation and event in cosmic space-time and human history. It is out of God’s non-being (nihilo) formed from his free self-contraction that the whole cosmos is created. This notion of God’ free self-contraction follows the concept of tzimtzum articulated by renowned theologian Jurgen Moltmann.[5] Thus, God can be said to be the immanent ground of all things and lifeforms but in a tangential not monistic sense. Out of the nothingness (God’s non-being) that stems from God’s free self-contraction, the cosmos and living being are created. Even so, God continues to be immanently present throughout all dimensions of reality and all instances of creation, for he is Emmanuel, God-with-us. Ponsonby (2007) terms this theo-ontological perspective “panmetatheism,”[6] a perspective that I share in line with biblical testimony. The term “pan-“ suggests all-pervasiveness of God’s divine being throughout creation; while the term “meta-“ points to the transcendent reality of God beyond creation.

Living and Dying: A Deep Dive

As we continue with the Lord’s Prayer, we come to a point of seeking God’s blessings in our lives. We ask God for our daily provision, a necessary reality in this earthly existence. In the several, we do so as followers of the Lord in obedience to his injunctions and imperatives, thankful for the unmerited grace and tender mercy that God shows us despite our self-centred resistance and stubborn rebellion towards him when we were yet to elicit faith in our hearts. In the joint, we see a deeper truth of our utter reliance on God for everything, where self and God no longer stand in opposition by way of experience. There is total entrustment to God and self-forgetful surrender to God in every detail of our lives. This is a condition of restfulness and abidance that goes beyond mere supplication or petition from the vantage point of experiential separation, self on this side and God on the other.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Our daily bread refers not only to daily necessities of food and drink, home and hearth, clothing and daily supplies, goods and services, friends and community; but more so the “living bread” of Life that nourishes and sanctifies the inner being, the soul. This “bread of Life” is none other than Jesus Christ himself, who makes himself present and real to us in the Holy Eucharist. The body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ is made truly and fully real to us as we c0-celebrate the Holy Mass with the celebrant Priest presiding over the Mass. The Holy Eucharist was personally instituted by Jesus Christ himself on the night of the Lord’s Supper, where he says these salient and profound words:

While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

- Mark 14:22-25 (NRSVCE)

The words and intent of Jesus are powerfully clear and direct. There is no ambiguous mincing of words here, as we see how Jesus uses the first person singular present indicative tense when he says “Take; this is my body.” The verb “is” stems from “eimi” in the Greek, which is parsed as “I am,” “am,” “it is I,” “I was,” and “I have been,” all of which suggests that Jesus was indeed intending for his very own being to be identified with the bread and also the wine as he says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.” It is clear to me that Jesus meant it literally, not symbolically. All this means that Jesus Christ who is the living Bread from heaven is literally our “daily bread” who nourishes and strengthens us from the core outwards. We partake of him in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, the source and summit of Christian spiritual life.

In partaking the Body of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, we simultaneously partake of Christ’s blood, soul, and divinity — for the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ are an integral whole. By “soul,” I mean all the dynamic operations of his psyche (intellect, emotion, volition, perception, sensation, somatic consciousness) and conscience (knowledge and discernment of good and evil). By “divinity,” I mean the “spirit,” which is the singular presence and power of pure holy consciousness, that immaculate naked pristine awareness that is uncreated, unborn, unoriginated, uncompounded, unconstructed, undying, unstained, incorruptible, and indestructible. Hence, in partaking of the Body of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, we enter into total union with Christ even as he gives himself entirely to us. Duality fades. Dichotomy dissolves. Binaries collapse. Unitive reality of consciousness and soul manifests. Mysteriously, we are drawn by the grace and power of God in Christ to realize experientially the devotional nonduality of Holy Communion.

Benedictine monk Fr. John Main provides us with a biblically sound and marvellously contemplative understanding of nondual meditation thus:

In its essential significance, the aim of meditation is just this: the realization of our total incorporation in Jesus Christ, in the cycle of Hid utterance by, and return to, the Father. The qualities we need in this fundamental encounter between ourselves and the ground of our being are attentiveness and receptivity. In order to realize our complex incorporation with the Word, we have not only to listen to its silence, the silence within us, but also to allow the cycle of its life to be completed in us and to lead us into the depth of its silence. There in the silence of the Word we share His experience of hearing Himself eternally spoken by the Father. That is why the life of Jesus is of such meaning and why Scripture’s record of His life is of such value. The experience of Jesus of Nazareth in awakening to Himself, entering the spheres of silence within Himself, finding His own Spirit and the source of His Spirit, is the experience of every person reborn in spirit. And it is, within the unimaginable design of the Father, the self-same experience. The wonder of creation is found, not in a succession of awakenings, but in the single all-inclusive awakening of Jesus, the Son, to the Father.[7]

Spirituality of the Everyday

“And forgive us our debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors.” The next line in the Lord’s Prayer speaks to the deep reality of  “missing the mark” (sin) and its consequences of shame and guilt in our psyche. Such sin, shame, and guilt can be construed as a debt that weighs heavily on our hearts, a debt to the innate justice and goodness of the cosmos rooted in the holy justice and goodness of God. In the several, we feel the weight of this debt on our being curtailing our freedom and inflicting sorrow and suffering in our lives. We may be conscious or unconscious about this weight on our souls, depending on the degree of suppression and repression exerted by our psyche in a bid to escape from the pain of this heavy psychospiritual weight. Praying this line is a way for us to acknowledge openly the presence of this weight of sin, shame, and guilt, and to surrender it to God. In so doing, there is a natural psychological release and a supernatural act of forgiveness that is ontologically applied to our souls in God’s reality. In truth, we are already forgiven by God in the person-event and work of Jesus Christ. Empirically though, this reality of forgiveness is effected only when we seek forgiveness from God in an act of self-honesty and self-entrustment to God.

In the joint, this line of the Lord’s Prayer speaks to the deep unity of the personal human heart and the gracious divine heart. There is by the very fact of Jesus Christ an unearned, undeserved, unmerited union of our being and God’s being, in the self-emptying love of the triune God demonstrated fully in Christ. Thus, the separation between humanity and God has been bridged by, in, and through Jesus Christ. Through prayer that deepens into pure contemplation, we are able to access this unitive reality experientially. Such unitive realization of indivisible God-humanity in the perichoresis ocean of love is the hidden dimension underlying the provisional words of forgiveness in this line of prayer. The definitive meaning of these words of the prayer transcends our binary and dualistic ways of thinking as well as our tendencies towards monistic essentialism by deliberately not succumbing to the language of oneness without difference.

Trappist monk and mystic Fr. Thomas Merton offers us profound words of wisdom that flow from his deep contemplative experience and realization. He gently but firmly encourages us to step deeper into the waters of contemplative union with God:

Here the soul goes to God in prayer. It speaks to Him without knowing what it is saying because God Himself has distracted the mind form its words and thoughts. It reaches Him without thoughts because, before it can think of Him, He is already present in the depths of the spirit, moving it to love Him in a way it cannot explain or understand. Time no longer means anything in such prayer, which is carried on in instants of its own, instants that can last a second or an hour without our being able to distinguish one from another. For this prayer belongs less to time than to eternity.[8]

Purification and Perfection

“And do not bring us to the time of trial but rescue us from the evil one.” A practical consideration arises in the course of one’s spiritual life — an encounter with the obstruction of and by evil. Such encounter with evil’s obstinate hindrance is commonplace, afflicting all sincere and resolute disciples of the Way of the Cross. Make no mistake. God does not bring or lead us into the “time of trial” (or “temptation”). What this line means is that as part of this broken and fallen world of experience, trails and temptations would inevitably arise in our paths. One can say that God in his omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence permits such trials and temptations to come our way. But rest assured that if this is the case, God also knows that we have the requisite ability to meet and overcome them; or he himself would supply us with the ability to do so.

In the several, we devotedly seek divine help and providence to rescue us from the obstruction of evil. It is a natural cry from the heart to admit our own weakness and thus need for a greater power — in this case, God — to intervene in our lives. There is nothing wrong or shameful about this. Since time immemorial, humanity has sought the intervention of higher powers to support our very existence on this planet, as we come face to face with a life of fragile uncertainty and unsettling vagaries of every kind.

In the joint, we come to see with God’s eyes that evil has already been dealt with at the Cross. Not only that, but evil also never stood a chance. For the Cross has been timelessly and eternally effectual in nailing the totality of creaturely and human sin onto the person of Jesus. Jesus Christ has timelessly and eternally confronted the totality of evil and its ramifications on the Cross, pouring out his blood to cleanse all that evil in a single stroke of divine grace and mercy. The body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ interact constructively and synchronize to resolve the problem of evil completely and perfectly for all time, space, reality, and dimension. Nothing is left undone by Jesus. In profound mystical contemplation, we melt into the cruciform and crucicentric reality of nondual union with the freedom, righteousness, holiness, joy, peace, hope, and love of Jesus Christ. Empirically nondual in luminous freedom and redemptive ecstasy, made possible and definite by the ontological bridging of the human-divine chasm by Jesus Christ, we flow and dance in the blissful joy and salvific goodness of our triune God that is unsurpassed and unprecedented in all of human religious history. Nor would this salvation experience in Christ be ever surpassed or replicated anywhere, anytime.

Epilogue: Cataphatic and Apophatic

Christian tradition speaks of two dimensions of theology and spirituality: the cataphatic and the apophatic. Cataphatic theology, and by extension spirituality, has to do with the use of positive words, ideas, imagery, icons and the like to approach the holy ground of God. Cataphatic theology and spirituality can be described as the via positiva approach. Apophatic theology and spirituality instead has to do with wordlessness, imagelessnes, and non-conceptual realization of God in absolute stillness and silence. Apophatic theology and spirituality can be thus described as the via negativa approach. We can loosely correlate the cataphatic with human-divine relationality in the several; and apophatic with human-divine relationality in the joint. In the several relationship between humanity and God, we enter into a dialogue and conversation with God as a distinct and separate person. In the joint relationship however, we enter and participate in the sheer unitive Being of God beyond all words, images, and concepts: empirically nondual but ontologically separate.

Both these approaches, the cataphatic and the apophatic, are not contradictory but complementary. They complement and synergize with each other to offer the Christian disciple and contemplative a powerfully rounded way into the very heart of the triune Godhead himself. Christian mystics through the ages have attested to this insight. In contemporary Christian practice, we can if we are bold enough come to experience how charismatic praise and worship replete with praying in tongues can progressively lead into an ever growing silence and stillness; finally climaxing in a profound quiet resting in the Spirit. With contemplative training, this quiet resting in the Spirit could cascade into blissful rapture deepening into absolute stillness and silence beyond duality, full of joy yet equanimous and poised.

In postmodern society and religion, there is an unhealthy and unwarranted fear of the apophatic tradition. This may be partly due to the uncritical overemphasis on language and conceptuality in our contemporary education and religious systems — a side-effect of the scientific and industrial revolutions that have rocked our world. Among Christians, there seems to be a blind paranoia of silence and stillness as a mode of deep prayer. The common nonsensical line often touted is this: “Do not empty your mind or the devil will get into you!” This cliché is not only misguided but life constraining, if not harmful. Such unquestioned assumptions lead Christians into fearing silence and solitude, eschewing the transcending of word, images, and concepts in the act of profound contemplative prayer. In this way, Christians are being robbed of the vast potentials of such contemplative practice and end up resisting what God wants to do for and with them in times of deep silence and stillness beyond words. This is tragic!

In this vein, the wise advice of St. John of the Cross may assist us in moving beyond our irrational fear of silence and stillness:

This divine knowledge of God never deals with particular things since its object is the Supreme Principle. … This sublime knowledge can be received only by a person who has arrived at union with God, for it is itself that very union. It consists in a certain touch of the divinity produced in the soul, and thus it is God himself who is experienced and tasted there. Although the touch of knowledge and delight that penetrates the substance of the soul is not manifest and clear, as in glory, it is so sublime and lofty that the devil is unable to meddle or produce anything similar (for there is no experience similar or comparable to it) or infuse a savour and delight like it. This knowledge tastes of the divine essence and of eternal life, and the devil cannot counterfeit anything so lofty.[9]

Let us think for a moment with discernment: if you are a baptized Christian, you necessarily have the Holy Spirit dwelling within you. Would the Holy Spirit in your being cede ground to the devil? Would satan have any chance of entering you in the empty silence and stillness of your soul? Who would you encounter when you have released into empty silence all the distracting thoughts, feelings, ideas, images, memories, fantasies, expectations, self-chatter, and vocal diarrhoea of your mind? Yes, you have let go of all that surface garbage of your mind, but the mind can never be “empty” in an absolute sense. Why? Simply because the nature of mind is luminous and cognizant even though it does not have an inherent existence by its own power. The luminous, cognizant, and naked nature of the mind is suffused by the sheer power and presence of the Holy Spirit for Christian disciples. We encounter none other than the Holy Spirit in that wondrous silence, that spacious freedom of the soul beyond words, images, and concepts. Why deprive yourself of that?

God is calling and inviting us into a far deeper intimacy with him, beyond the pale of our surface-level cognitive and vocal busyness. This intimacy can never be had if we refuse to leave the boat of our mental verbiage. We need to have the courage to step into the deep waters and walk by God’s grace to the further shore of liberation. This liberation is none other than full union with the triune Godhead, to be perfected beyond this life but intimated and temporally tasted here in this very life. Let us not delay any longer! Let us cast off our paranoia to respond with sanctified boldness to the invitation of Christ, our Beloved Lord and Friend. We are His. And He will never leave us or forsake us or lose his sheep.

Amen. Amen. Amen.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

NOTES

[1] John Paul Thomas. Chapter 11 The Lord’s Prayer. Available from https://mycatholic.life/the-my-catholic-life-series/my-catholic-worship/chapter-11-the-lords-prayer/#book accessed 27 June 2026.

[2] For this framework of “joint” and “several,” I am indebted to Wilfred Yeo my brother in Christ and a key figure in the Methodist-led charismatic revival movement in Singapore in the 1970s and 80s.

[3] St. Teresa of Avila (1980, 2000). The Way of Perfection: Study Edition. Text prepared  and translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington DC: ICS Publications, p. 337.

[4] Meister Eckhart (1994). Selected Writings. Trans. Oliver Davies. London: Penguin Books, pp. 239-40.

[5] John W. Cooper (2007). Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers. Form Plato to the Present. Nottingham: Apollos, pp. 252-4.

[6] Simon Ponsonby (2007). God Inside Out: An In-depth Study of the Holy Spirit. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications, p. 88. 

[7] John Main (2006). Silence and Stillness In Every Season: Daily Readings With John Main. Ed. Paul Harris. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 188.

[8] Thomas Merton (1983). No Man Is An Island. Boston and New York: Harper Collins, pp. 49-50.

[9] St, John of the Cross (2017). The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Trans. Kieren Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington DC: ICS Publications, pp, 246-7.