Weekly Pause & Ponder

Cosmologists Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry have suggested that we are a culture that is presently in between stories (1992), between world views. Both science and spirituality have a stake in the story that is being created. Each alone has only partial answers to the questions of who we are and what we are capable of becoming. Indeed, as twenty-first century life unfolds, it is becoming increasingly clear that each of us has a voice in the answers to these questions. Through transformations in consciousness, each of us is empowered to help craft a new story–one that is more just, compassionate, and sustainable, now and for future generations.

  

Living Deeply: the Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life
by Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Ph.D., Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D., and Tina Amorok, Psy.D., pp.210-211.

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.