Everything Belongs: Week 1
God Must Belong Too
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas [or Richard or Joan or Sam] or the world or life or death or the present or the future. All of them belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. —1 Corinthians 3:22
God is also another word for everything. God created everything and is in sympathetic union with everything God created. St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), a Doctor of the Church, said that his entire life’s theology could be summed up in three sacred ideas:
Emanation: We come forth from God bearing the divine image, and thus our DNA is always grounded in the life of God (Genesis 1:26-27).
Exemplarism: Everything in creation is an example, manifestation, and illustration of God in space and time (Romans 1:20).
Consummation: All returns to the Source from which it came (John 14:3). The Omega is the same as the Alpha and this is God’s supreme and final victory.
If your religion is still playing the game of hide and seek—as though God is always elsewhere—and you are not intrinsically involved, you can assume your religion will have very little transformative power in your life. It will just persist as a kind of pre-conditioning and fear. God first has to belong to you before you will ever have the courage to believe that you could belong to God! This is the first and final impact of our belief in an Indwelling Holy Spirit who emanates from God, exemplifies God precisely as us, and then takes us back to where we came from—despite our many resistances and rebellions.
Gateway to Silence:
Everything—yes, everything—belongs.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs, sessions 1 and 2a (CAC: 2016), MP4 download; and
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 166.
