Center for Action and Contemplation - Richard Rohr's Meditation "The Garden as Unitive Consciousness" Monday, 24 February 2014

Center for Action and Contemplation - Richard Rohr's Meditation "The Garden as Unitive Consciousness" Monday, 24 February 2014
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Leaving the Garden"
"The Garden as Unitive Consciousness"
Monday, February 24, 2014
The Garden is the symbol of unitive consciousness. We cannot objectively be separate from God; we all walk in the Garden whether we know it or not. We came from God and we will return to God. Everything in-between is a school of conscious loving. The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote so well: “the Child is the father of the Man; and I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety. . . .” We live the rest of our lives “trailing clouds of glory,” as he put it (from Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood).
Authentic spiritual cognition always has the character of re-cognition to it! It is returning to where we started and as T. S. Eliot says, “knowing the place for the first time” (Four Quartets). Or as Jacob put it when he awoke from his sleep: “Truly, Yahweh was always in this place all the time, and I never knew it” (Genesis 28:16). That is, without doubt, the common experience of mystics, saints, and all recovered sinners (which is the only kind of saint).
Many of our journeys before this recognition are journeys away from the center, where we literally become “ec-centric” and off balance. These are the recurring biblical texts of fall and recovery, hiddenness and discovery, loss and renewal, failure and forgiveness, exile and return.
Fortunately, we are always being led back to the Center to discover who we really are in God. God seems both very patient and very productive with the journeys back and forth. Such is the pattern of the soul, of history and of the Bible, a progress of sorts, three steps forward, two steps backward, and as Lady Julian of Norwich says “Both are the mercy of God”!
Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 21
Gateway to Silence: Life is one good thing!
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