Weekly Pause & Ponder

“It is the energy of love that drives the world; it is God’s love as the heart of all reality that courses through our veins and the smallest subatomic particle of creation. To seek and find God is the heart of the mystic journey; in our own day it is a call that can never be separated from political love and the quest for a just and peaceful world. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a mystic in love with created reality, spoke often of love as the driving force in all of creation, as it moves toward the Omega Point–Christ–when God will be all in all. Every act of love moves all of us closer to that point of union; every act of selfishness and injustice is a step backward.” 

Great Mystics and Social Justice by Susan Rakoczy p.206

A Valentine's Day Pause & Ponder

Valentine's Day is linked with romantic love: with card sharing, gift giving and flowers sent to that special person in one's life. As beautiful as this may seem there is a deeper meaning expressed in everyday life and in countless ways. Love is Creation's first impulse, its sustaining energy, and is available to all. Love is birdseed on a porch railing in winter, a listening ear for the 90th time, when compassion trumps power and control, a cup of coffee shared. Love is hidden surprisingly in the stuff of life: in sacrifice, pain and transcendence of self. Every day is Valentine's Day!

Ann Marshall, CSJ

Weekly Pause & Ponder

“The reality we name as “God,” mightier and more vast than 400 billion galaxies, permeates my existence as a human person. Certainly God is infinite and unknowable, but we look into our hearts and lives, and there is this same God bursting to life in us.  Why do we keep looking elsewhere to find God? Why do we stay locked into a spirituality that looks for God in the heavens in preference to a spirituality that focuses on the God within and among us, urging and prompting us to claim our sacred identity - and live it? Here is the arena of conversion and the heart of Jesus’ message to all of us who have ears to listen.”

Excerpted from Tomorrow’s Catholic:Understanding God and Jesus in a New Millennium by Michael Morwood.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

“The universe shows the holy Oneness of Being. This is our home. We might even say, this is who we are.  All of us are this one being. We human beings are supported by everything the universe does with its various interactions that make the galaxies in their clusters and the stars in their attendant planets, some of which have the right conditions for biochemistry, which evolves to the point of self-consciousness and knowledge of all these universe interactions. When we are conscious and knowing, it’s the universe that is conscious and knowing. And our consciousness and our knowing are still working in the same pattern: diversifying, interacting, unifying. We are not alien or strange or different. We are the universe’s own.”

God’s Ecstacy:The Creation of a Self-Creating World p. 15, by Beatrice Bruteau.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

Consciousness Is Consciousness of the Whole

When God gives of God’s self, one of two things happens: either flesh is inspirited or Spirit is enfleshed. This pattern is really very clear. I am somewhat amazed that more have not recognized this simple pattern: God’s will is always incarnation. And against all of our godly expectations, it appears that for God, matter really matters. God, who is Spirit, chose to materialize! We call it the Christ Mystery.

This Creator of ours is patiently determined to put matter and spirit together, almost as if the one were not complete without the other. This Lord of life seems to desire a perfect, but free, unification between body and soul. So much so, in fact, that God appears to be willing to wait for the creatures to will and choose this unity for themselves—or it does not fully happen. Our yes to incarnation really matters, just like Mary’s did. Could this be the very meaning of consciousness? Certainly full consciousness of any event demands that we see its outer and its inner, its shape and also its meaning, its body and also its soul.

Richard Rohr Adapted from Near Occasions of Grace, p. 5