Weekly Pause & Ponder

God is love and love is the core of evolution; so too, love is God, and God is the core of evolution. Through billions of years with billions of violent events – cosmic cataclysms, massive explosions, biological extinctions, war, cannibalism, tornadoes, earthquakes, death –divine love has persevered without perishing because divine love can never be extinguished.  Love pushes through what appears to be dead and breathes it into new life. Love forever seeks more union, more being, and more consciousness. That is why humanity has no real future and cannot evolve without returning to love at the core of its being. The law of progress and the law of love must be joined together for the future of earthly life.

The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love, by Ilia Delio, p. 135.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

Humanity is on a heroic journey of development and discovery with three major stages – separation, initiation, and return. The core narrative concerns our movement from a long stage of separation, and into a time of profound initiation, and then to a long journey of return.  After thousands of years of separation and differentiation, humanity is now moving into a time of initiation where we face the consequences of that separation. From that initiation may come insight, connection, and a return to the Earth, one another, and the cosmos.

From “Change the Story to Change the World” an article by Duane Elgin
from Huff Post Media, 04/02/2012.

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.”