Reflection
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
Prayer
The whole earth is full of God’s glory.
Isaiah 6:3
Action
Reflect on your image of God and on the new universe story. How comfortable are you with an image of God in an evolving world? How can this help us make the world more compassionate and more just?
Suggested Reading
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
1 John 4:7-8
Finding God in all things is not an ’empirical eureka.’ When we desire to encounter God, we would like to verify him immediately by an empirical method. But you cannot meet God this way…A contemplative attitude is necessary: it is the feeling that you are moving along the good path of understanding and affection toward things and situations. Profound peace, spiritual consolation, love of God, and love of all things in God-this is the sign that you are on this right path.
Pope Francis
God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.
St. Augustine
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
Today’s mysticism begins when the totally transcendent image of God above or beneath or separate is replaced with a deepening sense of a universe immersed in and permeated by God’s loving presence active in all places¸ at all times, and in every human being and the rest of creation that ever existed. We are at a point of birthing a new image of God rather than trying to fit our old image of God into the new universe story.
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
Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
To be contemplative we must become converted to the consciousness that makes us one with the universe, in tune with the cosmic voice of God. We must become aware of the sacred in every element of life. We must bring beauty to birth in a poor and plastic world. We must restore the human community. We must grow in concert with the God who is within. We must be healers in a harsh society.
Joan Chittister