{"id":19689,"date":"2021-01-04T09:47:17","date_gmt":"2021-01-04T14:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19689"},"modified":"2021-01-04T09:47:17","modified_gmt":"2021-01-04T14:47:17","slug":"the-prayer-of-unveiling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19689","title":{"rendered":"The Prayer of Unveiling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/_kk4ME2s6xE\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nWeek One: A Time of Unveiling\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I\nknow in part, but then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.<\/em>&nbsp;\u20141 Corinthians 13:12<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we celebrate the beginning of a new year, we celebrate the rebirth\nof time. We wait for God to do new things. We wait for who we are. We wait for\nthe coming of grace, for the revelation of God. We wait for the truth. We wait\nfor the vision of the whole. But we cannot just wait. We must pray. We say that\nprayer is not primarily words. Yet prayer can be words, and if the words come\nout of that empty contemplative place, then we can trust that we really mean\nthem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Contemplative prayer is a form of unveiling, because it reveals what is\ngoing on beneath the polished and busy surfaces of our minds, our hearts, and\nour bodies. When we finally get still enough, contemplation can live within us\nin pure, open moments of right here, right now. This is enough, this is\nfullness. If it is not right here, right now, it doesn\u2019t exist. If we don\u2019t\nknow God now, how would we know God later? The mystics say we won\u2019t. We will\nnot recognize God later if we cannot recognize God now. It is a matter of\nseeing God now through the shadow and the disguise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Contemplative prayer lives in a spacious place, free of personal needs\nor meanings or even interpretations. Life does not care what I like or don\u2019t\nlike. It doesn\u2019t matter a bit. If we stay in the world of preference, we keep\nourselves as the reference point. Does it really matter what color I like best\nor what my current favorite movie is? It changes from moment to moment. No\nwonder people have identity crises. No wonder people have a fragile self-image;\nthey have nothing solid to build on beyond changing opinions and feelings. If\nformerly we said, \u201cI think therefore I am,\u201d now it might be \u201cI choose therefore\nI am.\u201d That\u2019s not a solid foundation to build on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The real\nquestion is \u201cWhat does this have to say to me?\u201d Those who are totally converted\ncome to every experience and ask not whether or not they liked it, but what\ndoes it have to teach them. \u201cWhat\u2019s the message or gift in this for me? How is\nGod in this event? Where is God in this suffering?\u201d This is a prayer of\nunveiling, asking that the cruciform shape of reality be revealed to us within\nthe very shape and circumstances of our own lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Pulling Back the Veil<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The future, however, is finer than any past. \u2014Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, <em>The Making of a Mind<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you are anything like me, there is some part of you that was relieved\nto turn the calendar over to 2021. The new year puts at least some symbolic\ndistance between ourselves and 2020, a year that brought so much chaos,\nheartbreak, and uncertainty to so many people throughout the world. I dare say\nthat no one lived through the past year without experiencing some level of\ndisruption and loss of freedom, of health, of loved ones, and especially our\ncherished notions of how things \u201cought\u201d to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Daily Meditations theme for 2021 is \u201cA Time of Unveiling.\u201d I\u2019m\nconvinced we are living in such a time\u2014when reality is being revealed as it is.\nSystems of evil have become both more brazen and banal, our sense of \u201cnormal\u201d\nhas been upended, and yet in the midst of it, God continues to invite us to\ndeeper transformation. A few weeks into the pandemic, some people even began to\nuse the word \u201capocalyptic\u201d to describe what was taking place. Often, this word\nis used to scare people into some kind of fearful, exclusive, or reactionary\nbehavior, all in expectation of the \u201cend times.\u201d But the word \u201capocalyptic,\u201d\nfrom the Greek <em>apok\u00e1lupsis,<\/em>&nbsp;really just means \u201cunveiling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The beginning of the new year seems like a good time to pause, \u201cpull\nback the veil,\u201d and ask, \u201cWhere is this all going? What is the end goal for all\nof us, and\u2014for that matter\u2014for the cosmos itself?\u201d Is our \u201clate, great planet\nEarth\u201d really headed toward Armageddon? In these fractious, unmoored, and\ndisillusioned times, I can hardly think of more relevant concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>No matter what is going on around us, it\u2019s important to remember that\nGod keeps transforming creation into something both good and new. Instead of\nhurtling us towards catastrophe, God always wants to bring us somewhere even\nbetter. A helpful word here is \u201cevolution.\u201d God keeps creating things from the\ninside out, so they are forever yearning, developing, growing, and changing for\nthe good. That might be hard to see sometimes in the moment, but it\u2019s\nnevertheless true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>While more and\nmore people seem to believe that that the universe has no form, direction, or\nfinal purpose, as Christians, we can be confident that the final goal does have\nshape and meaning. The biblical symbol of the Universal and Eternal Christ\n(Alpha and Omega) stands at both ends of cosmic time. This assures us that the\nclear and full trajectory of the world we know is an unfolding of consciousness\nwith \u201call creation groaning in this one great act of giving birth\u201d (Romans\n8:22). Why do I think this is such an important image to remember? Frankly,\nbecause without it we become very impatient with ourselves and others,\nparticularly when we encounter setbacks (both personal and communal). Humans\nand history both grow slowly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Week One: A Time of Unveiling For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.&nbsp;\u20141 Corinthians 13:12 When we celebrate the beginning of a new year, we celebrate the rebirth of time. We wait for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19689"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19689"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19690,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19689\/revisions\/19690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}