{"id":19928,"date":"2021-03-12T09:43:18","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T14:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19928"},"modified":"2021-03-12T09:43:18","modified_gmt":"2021-03-12T14:43:18","slug":"living-in-heaven-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=19928","title":{"rendered":"Living in Heaven Now"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/YhCzzQQNnLA\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p><em>Jesus spoke these things,\nand lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, \u201cFather . . . I do not ask on\nbehalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in me through their word;\nthat they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they\nalso may be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me.\u201d&nbsp;<\/em>\u2014John 17:1, 20\u201323<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This beautiful prayer for union is from Jesus\u2019\nLast Supper address to his disciples. It might be the highest level of mystical\nteaching in the entire New Testament. Here Jesus connects everything: he in his\nFather, the Father in you, you in God, God in him, God in the world, and you in\nthe world. It\u2019s all one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think this is the core realization of every\nsaint. Saints see things in their connectedness and wholeness. They don\u2019t see\nthings as separate. It\u2019s all one, and yet like the Trinity, it is also\ndifferent. What you do to another, you do to yourself; how you love yourself is\nhow you love your neighbor; how you love God is how you love yourself; how you\nlove yourself is how you love God. How you do anything is how you do\neverything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Faith is not simply seeing things at their\nvisible, surface level, but recognizing their deepest meaning. To be a person\nof faith means we see things\u2014people, animals, plants, the earth\u2014as inherently\nconnected to God, connected to ourselves, and therefore, absolutely worthy of\nlove and dignity. That\u2019s what Jesus is praying for: that we could see things in\ntheir unity, in their connectedness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I will go so far as to say that <em>the more we can connect, the more of a\nsaint we are<\/em>. <em>The\nless we can connect, the less transformed we are.<\/em> If we can\u2019t\nconnect with people of other religions, classes, or races, with our \u201cenemies\u201d\nor with those who are suffering, we\u2019re not very converted. Truly transformed\nindividuals are capable of a universal recognition. They see that everything is\none.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We don\u2019t <em>go<\/em> to heaven; we learn how to\nlive in heaven now. And no one lives in heaven alone. Either we learn how to\nlive in communion with other people and with all that God has created, or,\nquite simply, we\u2019re not ready for heaven. If we want to live an isolated life,\ntrying to prove that we\u2019re better than everybody else or believing we\u2019re worse\nthan everybody else, we are already in hell. We have been invited\u2014even now, even\ntoday, even this moment\u2014to live consciously in the communion of saints, in the\nPresence, in the Body, in the Life of the eternal and eternally Risen Christ.\nThis must be an almost perfect way to describe salvation itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jesus spoke these things, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, \u201cFather . . . I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in me through their word; that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that [&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\/19928"}],"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=19928"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19929,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19928\/revisions\/19929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}