Reflection
We have thought about God as somehow above us, with us, close to us, but distinct from us. We express this separation in our language of heaven and earth or when we say we long to be with God or that when we die we will go to God. This transcendent image of God does not fit with what we are beginning to know about the physical universe.
If the universe is indeed a love story, then we can no longer tell this story as if divinity and humanity are opposed to each other. God belongs fundamentally to the universe, not to the human person alone. The very existence of the universe points to God. Creation exists because God exists. God is uncreated but co-inheres in created being. God is the unlimited depth of love of all that is, a love that overflows into new life. God is love, and love is the energy that makes everything precious and alive. … Love transforms because love unites.
Ilia Delio
Prayer
Make me know your ways, O God; teach me your paths.
Lead me in your truth and teach me.
Psalm 25
Action
How are new understandings of the Universe Story expanding your prayer? Your relationships? How might new images of God bring meaning, comfort and justice to our world?
Suggested Readings
O God, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all:
Psalm 104
We have known and believed that God loves us. God is love. Those who live in God’s love live in God, and God lives in them.
John 4:16
To live God’s Universe Story is to participate in a large love. We need to be mystics, not moralists. We cannot wait for things to be perfect (friends, country, church, marriage) to fall in love with them, or we will never love anything. Once we accept that we are part of creation evolving, that we are evolving personally, then we are free to love the imperfect. We can love everyone and everything.
Richard Rohr
At the deepest level of consciousness divisions disappear. … Our inner depths are as wide as the love we allow to flow through us.
Barbara Fiand
In the Universe Story the person becomes open to the universe. There is in the world and in the universe a ground of unity in which all things communicate.
Karl Rahner
God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.
St. Augustine
My deepest me is God.
St. Catherine of Genoa
God pours God’s self out and the pouring out is creation. … We cannot separate God from the cosmos. Creation is the beloved of God, and the becoming of God in love. God is not conceivable except insofar as God coincides with evolution. … Evolution is essential to our understanding of God and God’s relationship to the world and our relationship to the world.
Ilia Delio