Sunday
The greatest dis-ease facing us right now is our profound and painful sense of disconnection. Yet many are discovering that the Infinite Flow of the Trinity—and our practical, felt experience of this gift—offers the utterly grounded reconnection with God, with self, with others, and with our world.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
The whole gospel message is radical union with God, with neighbor, and even with ourselves. I think that’s why so many people are drawn to church each week—to receive communion and eventually, hopefully, realize that we are in communion.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Twice per year, we pause the Daily Meditations to ask for your support. If you have been impacted by the CAC’s programs (including these Daily Meditations) and are financially able, please consider donating. We appreciate every gift, as we are committed to keeping our work and these Meditations accessible to all.
Wednesday
The only true life we will live in this world is the life we consent to live in relationship, messy and entangled though it might be. The only fruit worth sharing with the world is the fruit we’ll produce together.
—Debie Thomas
Thursday
Traditional Native Americans feel a sense of interconnectedness at a deep level. In Indigenous thinking, there is no such thing as separation of one part of our life from another.
—Randy and Edith Woodley
Friday
Rather than reinforcing competitive ways of knowing self, Ubuntu offers a way of discovering self-identity through interdependence.
—Michael Battle
Week Forty-Six Practice
Loving with the Mind of Christ
He will answer, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” —Matthew 25: 45
James Finley suggests that to put on the “mind of Christ” is to experience our connection to God and others, and to act accordingly:
To enter the mind of Christ is to realize our oneness with the faces we see on television in the evening news. It is to realize we are one with that homeless person we saw going through the trash receptacle. The woman at the local market, the man who comes to check our gas meter, and all who have hurt us, abandoned us, and have otherwise wronged us, along with all the women and men we have never met—we are to realize that we are equally, fully one with every blessed one of them. We are to give witness to this awareness … and we are to put this love into action by the ways in which we treat others, and by what we are willing to do for them as expressions of our love for them.
What comes through in the Gospels is that Jesus was someone to reckon with. There was a no-nonsense, straight-from-the-shoulder truthfulness about the way he related to others. He was not always necessarily nice. Jesus never said, “Blessed are the nice.” But Jesus was always loving to the core, and in being so he gave witness to our lifelong journey of learning to be loving to the core as well ….
Entering the mind of Christ is not a premature, proclaimed love that merely clamps a lid on unacknowledged anger and hurt. It is not writing everyone a blank check of boundless love that pretends we are something we are not. It is rather learning day by day to be transformed in all that love is asking of us in learning to be a truly awake, Christlike human being…. A lifetime of recognizing and yielding to a Christlike love for all [people] … as children of God enlarges the heart to divine proportions.
Reference:
James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 192–194.
Image credit and inspiration: Georg Arthur Pflueger, Untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Germany, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We are individual pieces in an intricately interconnected weave of reality; together we make a whole.
