Oneness
In my last post I talked about being transformed through the practice of contemplation. I guess I may have given a good visual of God’s response but I didn’t adequately explain the result of our transformation, HOW we benefit from the practice. The simple answer is that we become aware of our existence – an existence that makes us all one! We begin to move away from the us/them mentality and toward an attitude of communion with all of creation. Is it easy? Absolutely not, but it’s what happens when we make contemplation a regular practice.
Our God begins the work of transformation, unbeknownst to us, and eventually we wake up and we can’t kill the spider that’s crawling on our bedroom wall. We wake up and we see “Groot” (if you’ve seen Guardians of the Galaxy you know what I’m talking about) in all the trees and appreciate their beauty. We stand in awe and wonder in the dark, looking up at the night sky. Most importantly, we look at the person next to us (regardless of their race or religion) and we see our sister or brother. We look at them with love because they too were created in the image and likeness of God. Division is snuffed out and ONENESS prevails. THAT is the result of contemplation.
I have often said that I love my faith and I love my religion. I love the traditions, the symbolism and the teachings of the Catholic Church. It all works to strengthen my relationship with God. It works for ME, it doesn’t work for everyone and I’m ok with that. I try to inspire people to experience a “conversion” of heart never a conversion of religion. I don’t believe we were put on this earth to “convert” people in the strictest sense, but to share the light of Christ with others. In my conversations with my husband about how people interpret Scripture or how we choose to live out our faith, he often says: I don’t believe God is that petty! Richard Rohr said it best in his meditation this morning:
Infinite Presence, Infinite Love
Monday, November 7, 2016
When he considered the primordial source of all things, [St. Francis] was filled with even more abundant piety, calling all creatures, no matter how small, by the name of brother and sister, because he knew they had the same source as himself. —Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274) [1]
If Christianity would have paid attention to the teachings and example of Jesus and Francis, our planet—“Mother Sister Earth,” as Francis called her—would perhaps be much healthier today. But it took until the 21st century for a pope to write an entire encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, making this quite clear and demanding.
We have not honored God’s Presence in the elemental, physical world. We made God as small as our own constricted hearts. We just picked and chose, saying, “Oh, God is really only in my group, in baptized people, in moral people, etc.” Is there that little of an Infinite God to go around? Do we have to be stingy with God? As Isaiah put it “the arm of God is not too short to save!” (59:1). Why pretend only we deserve God, and not other groups, religions, animals, plants, the elements, Brother Sun, and Sister Moon? It just won’t sell any more.
God is saving creation and bringing all creatures back where they began—into union with their Creator. God loves everything that God has made! All created things God proclaimed “good” (see Genesis 1:9-31 and Wisdom 11:24-12:1). But we, with our small minds, can’t deal with that. We have to whittle God and Love into small parts that our minds can handle and portion out. Human love is conditional and operates out of a scarcity model. There’s not enough to go around, just like Andrew said about the boy’s five loaves and two small fish (John 6:9). Humans can’t conceptualize or even think infinite or eternal concepts. We cannot imagine Infinite Love, Infinite Goodness, or Infinite Mercy.
Tertullian, a third century Father of the Church, often called the first Christian theologian, said “enfleshment is the hinge of salvation.” [2] We don’t come to the God Mystery through concepts or theories but by connecting with what is—with God’s immediate, embodied presence which is all around us. I want you to begin to notice that almost all of Jesus’ common stories and examples are nature based and relationship based—and never once academic theory! (Fr. Thomas Berry [1914-2009] taught the same way in our time, and I hope to share his work much more in my writings and teachings in the future.)
We have not recognized the one Body of Christ in creation. Perhaps we just didn’t have the readiness or training. There is first of all the seeing, and then there is the recognizing; the second stage is called contemplation. We cannot afford to be blind any longer. We must learn to see and recognize how broad and deep the Presence is if we are to truly care for our common home.
God is love! Love and oneness takes less work to experience than division and judgment – why not take the easy road? God bless you!
Serenity
I’ve been trying to “sell” this contemplation thing for some time now. It seems people just can’t find the time to sit in stillness.
Just recently I had an aha moment as I watched my beloved puppies sleeping. It made me realize there’s more to contemplation than I’ve been letting on. Yes, it’s relaxing. Yes, it brings peace. Yes, it changes you, but how? Then it hit me – every time I see my dogs sleeping or just being still I get this urge to lay with them and hug, kiss and caress them. I get this overwhelming loving feeling in my heart. Let me be clear, I love them always but these times of stillness move me the most. I just don’t get the same overwhelming feeling when they’re running, jumping or eating – when they’re “busy” living their lives. Can you see where I’m going with this?
Yes, God is always with us. As a matter of fact, during one of my latest retreats I came across an interesting sign. It read: Bidden or not bidden God is present. The translation – Invited or not invited God is present. There is no doubt in my mind that God is everywhere. However, I believe that our state of being has everything to do with the distance He keeps or at least how we perceive the distance He is keeping.
Just think for a moment about how you feel about your children (or pets if, like me, you don’t have children). Wouldn’t you agree that there’s something about these precious gifts being still and silent that makes you want to hug and kiss all over them – to squeeze them into you? That’s what I believe God feels. He wants to love us, embrace us, speak to us and transform us. Unfortunately, He can’t get a word in edgewise when we’re too busy to acknowledge His presence.
That’s where contemplation comes in. Imagine being still and God getting the same overwhelming loving feeling for us I talked about earlier – except as with all things God – it’s even more so! The love He feels toward us is magnified. WOW! That’s it! That’s when He’s closest – in the STILLNESS. That’s when we can FEEL Him – in the STILLNESS. THAT’S when we will be fed, transformed and truly happy!
I think of all the things we do in life that require work. We want nice things in life so we spend most of our day working at a job that sometimes we don’t even like. We want to be healthy so we eat some things that we’d rather not and we go to the gym to work out and honestly cannot say we “like” it.
Day in and day out, we do a number of things that require real WORK, either in terms of labor or in terms of psychological manipulation and yet we do them because they lead to something we want. They lead to results, something tangible, something visible. THAT’S where the problem lies. This contemplation thing, the just “sitting” doesn’t bring about results we’re used to. So we’re not in a rush to just sit and waste time. But I promise you, it’s not a waste of time. You may not see the results you’re used to seeing, but change is happening. Transformation is happening. God is working, He is there in the midst of it all!
I recently read the following excerpt in the Liturgy of the Hours:
In good pastures and on the high mountains of Israel, I shall feed them. And their grazing ground shall be there, that is, the place where they will rest, where they will say: “I am happy”; where they will say: “It is true, it is clear, we are not deceived.” They will find rest in the glory of God, when they find rest in those grazing grounds. And they will sleep, that is, find rest, and they will rest in good pleasures.
He never ceases to amaze me! How He guides me in my reading – where everything I come across at a particular point in time seems to have a common theme. I understood the “mountain” in this excerpt to symbolize the stillness I have been alluding to. We are told that the mountain is the grazing ground where we will find rest, where we will be happy.
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