The Universal Christ

From "The Universal Christ" by Richard Rohr:-

[i]As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, "Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of." Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply.[/i]

Such a way of seeing and being is not a falling away from what has always been believed by the "true Christian" but is in fact simply part of the Great Tradition of the Christian Faith from its earliest days.

This way of seeing, being and knowing represents the fertility of the earth itself and the wondrous, healing, natural power of creation of our phenomenal world. Such seeing is simply a function of the nature of reality, intimately connected with the dynamic support of the earth, space itself, and a multidimensional view of the movements of time. Time and space is a "vital, ephemeral agent of awareness and healing. All spaciality and temporality potentially hold liberative qualities."

Now over to those who wish to jeer, denigrate, call names or simply insist that there is only one truth (i.e. theirs)

Thank you

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SW-User

On "paths as home" , I think perhaps the first time I heard the term was when reading the beautiful travelogue of the Japanese poet Basho, this in his own introduction to that work (i.e. "The Narrow Road to the Deep North"):-

[i]The moon and the sun are eternal travellers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. From the earliest times there have always been some who perished along the road. Still I have always been drawn by windblown clouds into dreams of a lifetime of wandering.[/i]

I see now a relationship between any thought of final arrival with the thought that one has found a final truth, even [i]the[/i] truth. Worse, of thinking it is "ours", a possession. I'm reminded of some words found in a letter of Thomas Merton, speaking of an American religious group, the Shakers....

[i]The Shakers remain as witnesses to the fact that only humility keeps man in communion with truth, and first of all with his own inner truth. This one must know without knowing it, as they did. For as soon as a man becomes aware of "his truth" he lets go of it and embraces an illusion.[/i]

Emptiness, kenosis.