Weekly Pause & Ponder

When his followers wanted to proclaim him the Messiah, the divinely anointed king of Israel who would inaugurate the reign of God’s justice upon the earth, Jesus shrank from all that and said, strongly and unequivocally, “My kingdom is not of this world.”  Where is it then? Jim Marion’s wonderfully insightful and contemporary suggestion is that the Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness; it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place.  Marion suggests specifically that the Kingdom of Heaven is Jesus’s own favourite way of describing a state we would nowadays call a “nondual consciousness” or “unitive consciousness.”

The Wisdom Jesus, by Cynthia Bourgeault, p. 30.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

“The world must have a God, but our concept of God must be extended as the dimensions of our world are extended,” wrote Teilhard almost a century ago. In the early twentieth century, evolution had changed everything, he noted. And he predicted that only those religions would survive that were willing to develop forms of their traditions that organically embrace the reality of an evolutionary worldview.

Carter Phipps interview with John Haught on “bigthink.com.”

Weekly Pause & Ponder

In our very longing for a world free from violence and injustice, lie the seeds of hope.  But such hope can only be sustained by the certitude conferred by faith. As the Universal House of Justice assures us: “The turmoil and crises of our time underlie a momentous transition in human affairs… That our earth has contracted into a neighbourhood, no one can seriously deny. The world is being made new. Death pangs are yielding to birth pangs. The pain shall pass when members of the human race act upon the common recognition of their essential oneness. There is a light at the end of this tunnel of change beckoning humanity to the goal destined for it according to the testimonies recorded in all the Holy Books.”

Article by Matthew Weinberg entitled “Identity and the Search for a Common Purpose.”

Weekly Pause & Ponder

The universe may be said to be the original Adam, a great body of dust, organized into a system and energized by the “breath” of God so that it keeps on developing becoming more complex – more diversified, more interactive, and therefore more unified. 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 are the universe’s own.

God’s Ecstasy: the Creation of a Self-Creating World by Beatrice Bruteau, p. 14-15.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

Creation is our true, authentic home, the household of all life, including those who have gone before us. The afterlife does not exist outside creation, but within it, a realm in which our departed loved ones inhabit a different level of being – within the one cosmos.

Webpage of Diarmuid O’Murchu, Adult Faith Development.