Connecting to the Whole
Father Richard describes the holiness we experience through connection and healing:
Holiness reveals itself through our capacity for positive connection. The more we can make connections, and the more with which we can connect, the “holier” we are. God is precisely the One who connects all things, one to another. Before enlightenment or wholeness, we rank things up or down; afterward, we connect things horizontally—almost automatically!
Many have said most of our problems today tend to be psychological, but the solution is always spiritual. Only healthy, great religion is prepared to realign, re-heal, and reconnect all things, and reposition us inside the whole universe of things. Thomas Merton said the True Self should not be thought of as anything different than life itself—not my little life, but the Big Life. [1]
I’m not going to call the True Self just “life” or “being.” More basically, I’m going to call it “love.” We were made for love and love is who we are, as I believe we are metaphysically created out of the infinite love relationships that are the Trinity (see Genesis 1:26–27). There is increasing evidence that love is the basic physical structure of the universe, as revealed in all things existing in orbital, contextual, magnetic, and sexual ways. The Song of Songs (8:6) says love is as strong as death, and the flash of love is a flash of fire, a flame of YHWH. Everything can be seen as a little experience of the Big Flame. We’re just a little tiny flicker of a much-larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very Self. Once we say it, it seems obvious. What else would it be?
On one level, soul, consciousness, love, and the Holy Spirit can all be thought of as one and the same. Each of these point to something larger than the self, shared with God, and even eternal. That’s what Jesus means when he speaks of “giving” us the Spirit or sharing his consciousness with us. One whose soul is thus awakened has the “mind of Christ” (see 1 Corinthians 2:10–16). That doesn’t mean the person is psychologically or morally perfect, although such a transformed person does see things in a much more expanded and compassionate way. Ephesians calls it a “spiritual revolution of the mind” (4:23)—and it is!
In chapter 14 of John’s Gospel, Jesus calls this implanted Spirit the “Advocate” (v. 16) who is “with you and in you” (v. 17), makes us live with the same life that he lives (v. 19), and unites us to everything else (v. 18, 20). He goes on to say that this “spirit of truth” will “teach you everything” and “remind you of all things” (v. 26) as if we already knew this somehow. Talk about being well-equipped from a Secret Inner Source. Religion’s main and final goal is to reconnect us (re-ligio) to the Whole, to ourselves, and to one another—and thus heal us.
Jesus Is a Wholemaker
Franciscan author Ilia Delio understands Jesus as a “wholemaker” who gathers and heals disconnected and wounded parts of individuals and communities:
The Gospels open with the word metanoia, “repent,” indicating a summons to a complete change of life for both the individual and society. This change is not a single event but a permanent newness of life. Christianity … is more dynamic than the classical hierarchic pyramid with God at the top, humans in the middle, and plant and animal life below. The new Christian order is not about fixity of place in the hierarchy but inclusiveness within the whole concept of order itself, a holarchy [a system of “holons,” or parts that also make up a whole, such as a seed]. Jesus’ intimate experience of God and his self-identity with the Father (“The Father and I are one,”) empower him to act in the name of love by healing and reconciling all that is unloved in human persons. He gathers what is scattered, healing the sick, eating with sinners, speaking with women, dining with tax collectors and Gentiles, dealing with each person as one called into greater wholeness. The story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman (John 4:4–26) shows the new religious consciousness that erupts in this man from Galilee….
In his encounter with the woman at the well, Jesus broke three Jewish customs: first, he spoke to a woman; second, she was a Samaritan woman, a group the Jews traditionally despised; and third, he asked her to get him a drink of water, which would have made him ceremonially unclean from using her cup or jar. This shocked the woman at the well. But Jesus lived in unrestrained love, inwardly free from laws and customs that hindered wholeness and community.
Jesus prioritizes what Delio calls a “love that makes whole” and heals through an ever-greater unity between God, people, and creation:
Jesus was a “wholemaker,” bringing together those who were divided, separated, or left out of the whole. He initiated a new way of “catholicity,” a gathering together of persons in love. At the end of his life he prayed: “That they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me” (John 17:21). He gathered together what was divided and confronted systems that diminished, marginalized, or excluded human persons. He challenged others not by argument or attack but out of a deep center of love. Jesus said, “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39). Faith in Christ should move us to be loving and free, to create new wholes, and in doing so, to create a new future for the human person, for society, and for the whole earthly community.
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