Incarnation: Week 2
Summary: Sunday, January 17-Friday, January 22, 2016
The only way I know how to teach anyone to love God, and how I myself can love God, is to love what God loves, which is everything and everyone, including you and including me! (Sunday)
Jesus’ resurrection is not a one-time anomaly, but the regular and universal structure of reality revealed in one person. (Monday)
Eternal life is not “chronological moments of endless duration,” but time as momentous and revealing the whole right now. (Tuesday)
The Risen Jesus, still bearing his wounds, is revealing the goal, the fullness, and the purpose of humanity itself, which is “that we are able to share in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), even in this wounded and wounding world. (Wednesday)
According to Teilhard de Chardin, the Risen Christ is the divine lure, a blinking, brilliant light set as the Omega Point of time and history that keeps reminding us that love, not death, is the eternal thing. (Thursday)
Jesus is not observing human suffering from a distance but is somehow in human suffering with us and for us. (Friday)
Practice: Body Prayer
If the incarnation is true and we are the Body of Christ, then prayer is fully experienced when it is also from the bottom up, when we “pray from the earth” at the energetic, cellular level. Adam and Eve must receive and breathe the breath of YHWH for themselves. Only then are humans, composed of both breath and soil, fully alive.
There are many forms of body prayer—for example, chant, walking meditation, dance, yoga, tai chi, pilgrimages, prayer beads, gestures, and breathing exercises. Choose a contemplative movement to repeat as you pray. Rather than think your prayer, energetically feel it. Rest and lean into the Body of Christ already within you rather than trying to pull an Infinite God into your finite world. Your body itself receives and knows God; it is indeed a temple where God’s Spirit dwells (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).
To “pray from the clay” will also move you to the shared level of prayer. You will know that “you” are not doing the prayer; the Body of Christ is now praying through you and with you (Romans 8:26-27). Now you pray not so much to Christ as much as through Christ, and you will know experientially that you are Christ’s Body too.
Gateway to Silence:
God in me sees God who is also beyond me.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013), 208-210.
For further study:
Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking (CD, MP3 download)
Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
