Sponge in water vs water in sponge how to understand St. Teresa properly?
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The key understanding for this is that God is present everywhere (omnipresence) but He is not Present (capital intentional) everywhere. That is, God doesn't make His Presence manifest everywhere.
With that in mind, the quote becomes a bit clearer. At the outset, a sponge doesn't have any water. Put it in some water though, and the water will start seeping into the sponge. The water fills up the tiny voids present all throughout the sponge and at the end, the sponge is saturated. (Note also that the sponge expands a little; it doesn't drastically change size.) Similarly, most human souls (Christians included) are dry like a sponge, but if we spend time in the Presence of God, His Divinity will slowly fill us up until we are saturated.
There are many, many attributes of God that we don't have vocabulary for, so we say it is like this or like that, which typically implies that the two are not the same (nor do they even have to correspond fully). St. Teresa here uses "as" in the same function. She says God's Divinity filling up the soul is like water filling up a sponge, which is her intended comparison. She didn't intend to imply that God's Divinity had other characteristics of water or that God fills up the world like a sponge; both are out of the scope of this metaphor.
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I feel St. Teresa is describing the experience of the finite becoming one with the infinite. The infinite is undivided. It is one, but it has the ability to be infinite and finite because it contains duality within its unity. In Christianity we symbolize the infinite as God the Father and in the infinite we find duality or Jesus representing the unity of God the Father in human form. A oneness with an infinity that is endless. It is not a number and doesn't do anything; it just is without end for Eternity. Infinity plus one is still infinity because it is endless, which we Christians substitute the word God. We have many numbers in infinity just like we have an endless number of things in God. Jesus said, "I and the Father are one." He is in infinity and a part of it, but united wholly or totally with it. We are also in infinity, but we are not aware of being totally united with it. The mystics of every religion have pointed to this experience of unity where duality becomes aware of it. The Bible says, “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” We are finite, but we are in God who is infinite if we break up the word infinite we get in the finite, in- finite; therefore, in the infinite we have the finite or duality. John Kuykendall's author page
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