Sunday
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.
—John 1:1, 3
Monday
Discovering Christ as the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe can transform the way we perceive and the way we live in our everyday world.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
God’s word to humanity is not primarily the word spoken in a book, in sacred literature, but it is a word that is incarnate, not only as a human being, but present as an element in all beings, in all created reality.
—Ursula King
Wednesday
On Christmas Eve, we celebrate a new beginning. We welcome the dawning of a new light.
—Brian McLaren
Thursday
Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it!
—Richard Rohr
Friday
Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality.
—Ilia Delio
Week Fifty-Two Practice
Joining Jesus in the Mind of Christ
James Finley invites us to rest in the same awareness or “mind of Christ” that Jesus lived from:
Entering the mind of Christ means to enter into God’s oneness with us as flesh-and-blood human beings. Jesus was a human being. He woke up in the morning and got out of bed. He went to the bathroom, washed up, had something to eat, and got ready for his day. He stood up and sat down. He inhaled and exhaled. His beating heart sent his blood coursing through his veins. He saw and heard and smelled and tasted and felt what went on around him….
You get the impression that Jesus was fully human from the ground up. He did not live out of his head. It was not mere ideas that he espoused, but deeply realized, deeply lived truths of what it means to be a fully alive human being. Saint Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” We see the glory of God in the fully alive human person of Jesus. And in this way we, in seeing Jesus, see the glory of the flesh-and-blood human being we simply are and are called to be.
When we meditate, we enter the mind of Christ from the ground up. We do not bypass our breathing. Rather, we sit and listen and settle into the mystery of breathing…. When we sit still, we do not bypass the concrete immediacy of our bodily being. Rather, in sitting still we settle into the mystery of our bodily being that God the Father eternally contemplates in Christ the Word. When we meditate, we do not bypass our feelings. Rather, we settle into the mystery of all our feelings, as having their hidden, uncreated origins in the Father’s eternal contemplation of our feelings in Christ the Word. When we sit in meditation, we neither continue thinking nor abandon thought. Rather, we sit, quiet and still, in deepening meditative awareness of the uncreated origins of the Father’s eternal contemplation of thought in Christ the Word.
Reference:
James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 190–191.
Image credit and inspiration: Maciej Wodzyński, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Both the summer daisy and the winter freeze exist as exhalations of God, each a shining expression of the divine unfolding—from the cosmos to the incarnation of Jesus.
