Weekly Pause & Ponder

Life is changing constantly, but change is never random. There are always causes and conditions. The reason that living systems change is in order to survive. If their environment shifts, they adapt, figuring out what works in the context of now. They don’t do this as isolated individuals but as neighborhoods. Each individual is free to decide how it will change, but individual adaptations only work within the context of community. It’s more accurate to think of sense making and adapting as a collective activity, individual creativity within a community. And it’s a process that works well to create difference, differentiation, and coherence - billions of species living in a web of “inter-being,” as Thich Nhat Hahn describes it. This is our wondrous planet, “A world which gives birth to ever new variety and ever new manifestations of order against a background of constant change,” adapting, experimenting, discovering what works and, ultimately, surprising us with what emerges.

So Far From Home:lost and found in our brave new world,
by Margaret J. Wheatley p. 40.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

The central idea of the Western tradition is that human beings are partners with God in the continuing creation of the world. “Creation” isn’t something that happened a long time ago in the past. It’s what’s going on right now, right this  minute. We’re in the midst of it. As Jesus said, God is God “not of the dead but of the living” (Mat. 22:32). Theologically we are living in an open universe. We have access to endless energy.  Being creative is the nature of Being itself, and it is our nature. We can’t identify or judge ourselves by what we have been. We must look to what we yet shall be.

...This idea of the future. The idea of an intentional transformation of the fundamental arrangements of existence. The idea that God expects things to change, wants things to change, intends change and growth and improvement, and expects us to participate in this creative effort. God is the God of the living, is the living God. Maybe there will never be a time when it’s finished, all over.
 

The Holy Thursday Revolution by Beatrice Bruteau, p. 248.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

"While all forms of life, to differing degrees, have consciousness, only human beings have the miraculous capacity to be aware of consciousness itself. As human beings, we know that we know. This capacity for self-reflective awareness, or self-consciousness, in the context of fourteen billion years of development, is a very recent emergence.  And it means everything. Because of the gift of self-reflective awareness, the human being, distinct from all other forms of life, has the capacity to recognize his or her own true identity as being not separate from the whole event of creation....The human vehicle becomes a vessel through which the whole universe is able to know itself."

Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening by Andrew Cohen, pp.43-44.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

"Teilhard de Chardin noted over fifty years ago that Christianity is a religion of evolution. The very claim that God becomes something other than God points to change within God. This may surprise us, but from a Christian perspective could God become a human person without change? Could the resurrection of Jesus Christ really bring about new creation without changing the relationship of human life to God? The problem of God “changing” arises when we consider God as unified and hence inert substance – the problem of being. However, scripture states that “God is love” (1Jn. 4:8), and love by its very nature is dynamic and relational. Love is energy and spirit. Change, therefore, cannot be extrinsic to God; rather, if God is love, then God is change."

The Emergent Christ by Ilia Delio, p.35

Weekly Pause & Ponder

"What is our future as committed Christians as the third millennium begins?  How shall we live the Christian life – how do we live the gospel now – as we seek to create a new, just, peaceful world? What resources of the Spirit of God are available to us in the quest to transform our cultures and societies?

Two temptations are enticing. One is to plunge into activism without a spiritual grounding. The other, especially insidious, is to take a deep breath, close the doors of the churches on the problems of society, and focus on a private experience of religion. For some, a “Jesus and me” religiosity is very satisfying since it allows them to seek personal holiness without attention to those outside their religious circle. This, however, is a corruption of the gospel, whose basic principle is love of God and love of neighbour."

Great Mystics and Social Justice by Susan Rakoczy, p. 1.