Our need for attachment, mother-love, and the assurance of abundance opens up for us new levels of joyful experience, even in passages that have been familiar to us for years: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

You are a “branch.” Branches have no unending source of resilience in themselves. They need to draw all of their life and all of their resources from another — they need to receive nourishment just as a child does at its mother’s breast. God is the fountain of life. The only fountain of life. His glorious life is meant to flow through us every day — healing us, filling us with creativity, courage, joy, playfulness, and resilience. It comes through attachment, bonded love, the soul’s union with God.

The goal of Christian faith is so much more than church attendance or holding certain doctrinal beliefs. The destiny of every human soul is union with God. As the Scottish Puritan Henry Scougal wrote, “[Christians] know by experience that true religion is a union of the soul with God, a real participation of the divine nature.” (from The Life of God in the Soul of Man)

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