Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States - Center for Action and Contemplation's Father Richard Rohr's Meditation "The One Face and the Everything" for Friday, 18 July 2014

Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States - Center for Action and Contemplation's Father Richard Rohr's Meditation "The One Face and the Everything" for Friday, 18 July 2014
Authentic mystical experience connects us and just keeps connecting at ever-newer levels, breadths, and depths, “until God can be all in all.

Jesus Christ, Detail of Deësis mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Jesus, the Christ"
"The One Face and the Everything"
Friday, 18 July 2014
A cosmic notion of Christ takes mysticism beyond the mere individual level that has been seen as its weakness up to now. That perception is one of the major reasons that many people mistrust and even dislike “mysticism,” because it feels all-too private, pious, and mystified, and never gets to the transpersonal, social, and collective levels. False mysticism, and we have had a lot of it, often feels too much like “my little Jesus and my little me,” and doesn’t seem to make many social, historical, corporate, or justice connections. As Pope Francis says, it is all “too self-referential.” 
If authentic God experience first makes you overcome the primary split between yourself and the divine, then it should also overcome the split between yourself and the rest of creation. For some, the split is seemingly overcome in the person of Jesus; but for more and more people, union with the divine is first experienced through the Christ: in nature, in moments of pure love, silence, inner or outer music, with animals, a sense of awe, or some kind of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon” experience.
If it is authentic mystical experience, it connects us and just keeps connecting at ever-newer levels, breadths, and depths, “until God can be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). Or as Paul also says, “The world, life and death, the present and the future are all your servants, for you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:22-23). Full salvation is finally universal belonging and universal connecting. Our word for that is “heaven.”
Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen says, “To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.” Jesus is the one face, we are the interface, and Christ is the Everything.
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pages 223-224, 226, 228
Gateway to Silence: In Christ all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).
-------
Center for Action and Contemplation
1705 Five Points Rd SW
Albuquerque, NM 87105 United States (physical) 
PO Box 12464
Albuquerque, NM 87195-2464 United States (mailing) 
(505) 242-9588
cac.org
-------