Sunday
The very nature of God is communion, receptivity, and generosity.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
If we are going to start with Trinity, then loving relationship is the universal pattern, the nature of our being.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
There is no separation between humans and God because of this mutual interabiding that expresses the indivisible reality of divine love. We flow into God—and God into us—because it is the nature of love to flow.
—Cynthia Bourgeault
Wednesday
For Jesus, oneness is not a matter of a static return to a source. It’s a dance of continual “giving is receiving.”
—Cynthia Bourgeault
Thursday
The vineyard, as it tends to be throughout Jesus’s teaching, is a symbol of the relational field, the dynamic interactiveness of the kingdom of God.
—Cynthia Bourgeault
Friday
God desires simply that we remain connected, a branch on the vine, which is the love of God.
—Richard Rohr
Week Twenty-Three Practice
A Blessing for Connected Belonging
Cynthia Bourgeault offers a blessing to students of The Divine Exchange:
Michael Brown, a contemporary South African spiritual teacher, writes, “‘Giving is receiving’ is the energetic frequency upon which our universe is aligned. All other approaches to energy exchange immediately cause dissonance and disharmony [in the world and] in our life experience.” [1] We are living in a world of interconnected belonging, exercised and made strong in the act of giving ourselves to one another and helping one another. Two thousand years ago, the prophet Jesus came announcing the same message, showing us how to do it, and sanctifying it with his own life, death, and resurrection.
Some say he was a prophet before his time, a seed planter, because the radical economic and social vision that he preached couldn’t catch on all at once. It had to grow steadily and slowly in the soil of our divided and self-preoccupied humanity for almost two millennia, until finally, our human consciousness evolved to the point where we were perhaps ready to receive it.
Today we find ourselves right at that tipping point. Are we ready to embrace this entirely different vision of collective belonging and dynamic exchange? In both science and the social sciences, these ideas once so radical—of dynamic reciprocal exchange as the basis for a flowing oneness and homeostasis in our whole planetary and interplanetary system—are gradually gaining force.
If we could just get across the hump and shift to this new paradigm, this whole new way of thinking from the collective, out and around rather than from the individual up, it may just happen that we see the shift to a whole new cosmovision, a whole new level of consciousness, maybe even within our own lifetimes.
These teachings have the power to help renew a deeper relationship and more confidence in this man, Jesus, and to see Christianity, the religion he seeded, as alive, modern, relevant, and fully up to the task of carrying this beautiful flowing vision of exchange and oneness into the new cosmovision. Christ and Christianity were born for this moment. The ball is in our collective hands. Let’s run with it.
References:
[1] Michael Brown, The Presence Process: A Healing Journey into Present Moment Awareness (Beaufort Books, 2005), 246.
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, “A Closing Blessing” in The Divine Exchange: Living in Sacred Rhythm (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2026). Enroll now to explore Christian wisdom traditions in this self-paced online course.
Image credit and inspiration: Shivam Mistry, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, India, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. In a great and ever evolving mystery, the Divine pours into us as we empty ourselves.
