From his fullness
we have all received
grace in place of grace.
- John 1: 16
"Who are you? That is the great question of the second half of the spiritual journey. … Our experience of life on the ordinary psychological level is normally one of being dominated by external events and our emotional reactions to them. Some of this is conscious, but much of it is rooted in the unconscious.
" … To bring oneself to nothing -- no thing -- is to cease to identify with the tyranny of our emotional programs for happiness and the limitations of our cultural conditioning.
"The ultimate abandonment of one's role is not to have a self as a fixed point of reference; it is the freedom to manifest God through one's own uniqueness. … For Christians, it is to be a kind of fifth Gospel.
"If we have not experienced ourselves as unconditional love, we have more work to do, because that is who we really are."
- Thomas Keating, The Human Condition
A Meditation
"My
Beloved said,
'My name is not complete without
yours.'
"I thought:
'How could a human's worth ever be such'?
"And God, knowing all our thoughts -- and all our
thoughts are innocent steps on the path --
then addressed my
heart,
"God revealed
a sublime truth to the world,
when he
sang,
"'I am made whole by your life. Each soul,
each soul completes
me.'"
- Hafiz, cited in Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems From God
To Practice
- Today we view an excerpt from "Human Evolution," God is Love: The Heart of All Creation and turn our gaze to the highest reaches of human evolutionary possibilities. This segment is about 10 minutes long; you will find the video and transcript on this page.
Herein, Fr. Thomas speaks of evolutionary development as God's way of creating, which suggests that:
- The divine plan is calling forth humans into ever-newer ways of becoming.
- Higher states of consciousness reveal the capacity to see God in everything.
- The spiritual life is the most important thing there is to do in life.
- The Christian contemplative path moves us more firmly in the evolutionary direction.
- We invite you to enter your inner room, reflect: Through the eons, through all creation that has ever been, from every possibility, all learnings and all experiences, to this very moment, you are the pinnacle of all creation that has ever existed. Can you sense wonder and reverence at your very human-divine being with all potentialities to be Christ?
Resources for Further Study:
You may wish to read:
- The Human Condition
- The Introduction and Chapters 1-5 and 7 in Invitation to Love (20th Anniversary Edition) and the Introduction through Chapter 6, in older editions.
An archive of previous emails may be found here.
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