{"id":20876,"date":"2022-01-03T10:04:26","date_gmt":"2022-01-03T15:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=20876"},"modified":"2022-01-03T10:21:13","modified_gmt":"2022-01-03T15:21:13","slug":"20876","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=20876","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/U-sme6SYyvk\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">We Are Made for Love<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Today we begin another year\u2019s journey of Daily Meditations together. Our <strong>2022 theme is \u201cNothing Stands Alone\u201d<\/strong>\u2014because the very nature of God and reality is relationship! Father Richard reflects:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Christian belief in the Trinity says that God is absolute relatedness. God is our word for&nbsp;<em>the ultimate ecosystem<\/em>&nbsp;that holds all things in positive relationship (see Colossians 1:17). As long as we\u2019re in honest and loving relationship with what is right in front of us, the Spirit can keep working in us and through us and for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus comes as a naked, vulnerable baby, totally dependent upon relationship with others. Naked vulnerability means that we are going to let otherness influence and change us. When we don\u2019t give other people any power over our lives, when we block them by thinking we can stand alone, or that otherness can\u2019t change us or teach us anything, we are spiritually dead. As our 2022 theme puts it:&nbsp;<em>Nothing Stands Alone.<\/em>&nbsp;And it\u2019s true! We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness. We call this love.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We really were made for love, and outside of love we die very quickly. If we are going to start with Trinity,&nbsp;<em>then loving relationship is the pattern, the very nature of being for us.&nbsp;<\/em>But when we start with a philosophical concept of being and then try to convince everyone that this being is, in fact, love, we don\u2019t have a lot of success. I\u2019ve been a priest for almost fifty-two years and can say that most Christians seem to be afraid of God. We Christians aren\u2019t more loving than anyone else; sometimes, we\u2019re even less loving than other people! In some ways, that\u2019s inevitable if we\u2019re basically relating to God out of fear, and we haven\u2019t been drawn into the love between the Father and the Son by the Spirit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jesus says the Spirit is always the hardest to describe, because \u201cthe Spirit blows where it will\u201d (see John 3:8). Jesus\u2019 message to us is clear: <strong>don\u2019t ever try to control the Spirit and say where it comes from, where it goes, or who has it. <\/strong>It\u2019s called group narcissism whenever we say our group is the only one that has the Spirit or the Truth. Every group at less mature levels will try to put God in their own pocket and say God only loves their group. Such a belief has nothing to do with the love of God. It isn\u2019t a search for Truth or Holy Mystery, but a search for control. It\u2019s the search for the small self, the search to make myself feel superior and to stand alone. I\u2019m not in control or in charge of this Holy Mystery. <strong>I don\u2019t presume to understand. All I know is I\u2019m forever being drawn\u2014through everything\u2014each manifestation (epiphany) calling for surrender, communion, and intimacy.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Symbolic of all of us, the \u201cthree wise men\u201d traveled long distances from their native religion and country to fittingly bow down before such an unknown Holy Mystery. It always leads to another Epiphany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Mutually Loving Gaze<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Our Daily Meditations theme this year reflects the reality that nothing stands alone. Father Richard describes the intimate relationship we experience when we allow ourselves to be loved, seen, and \u201cgazed upon\u201d by God:&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I believe that we do not have real access to&nbsp;<em>who we fully are&nbsp;<\/em>except in God. Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be&nbsp;<em>who&nbsp;<\/em>we are,&nbsp;<em>all&nbsp;<\/em>that we are, and&nbsp;<em>much more&nbsp;<\/em>than we think we are, \u201cwarts and all.\u201d (Make sure you need to be forgiven for something or you will never know this!) It\u2019s only when we find ourselves in God, and live and see through God\u2019s eyes that \u201ceverything belongs.\u201d All other systems exclude, expel, punish, and protect to find identity for their members in some kind of ideological perfection or separate superiority. Most think \u201cthe contaminating element\u201d must be searched out, isolated, and often punished. This wasted effort keeps us from the centrally important task of love and union.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To have naked interface with the Ultimate Other is to know one\u2019s self in one\u2019s truest and deepest being. When we allow ourselves to be perfectly received, totally gazed upon by the One who knows everything and receives everything, we are indestructible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we can learn how to receive the perfect gaze of the Other, and to be mirrored by the Other, <strong>then the voices of the human crowd, even negative ones, have little power to hurt us<\/strong>. Best of all, as Meister Eckhart (1260\u20131327) has been quoted, \u201cThe eye with which you will look back at God will be the same eye with which God first looked at you.\u201d [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Standing humbly before God\u2019s gaze not only unites the psyche but it does the very thing that I know when I teach contemplative prayer. It unifies desire. It frees us from what Henri de Lubac (1896\u20131991) called the \u201cvertigo of the imagination<em>.<\/em>\u201d [2]<em>&nbsp;<\/em>It\u2019s the whirlpool of imagination, looking here, there, and everywhere. Standing before&nbsp;<em>one, accepting&nbsp;<\/em><em>God<\/em>&nbsp;literally allows us to be composed and gathered in one place. We&nbsp;<em>can&nbsp;<\/em>be in one place; we&nbsp;<em>can&nbsp;<\/em>be here, now. We can stop always looking over there for tomorrow\u2019s happiness. As the apostle Paul wrote, \u201cnow is the favorable time, today is the day of salvation\u201d (2 Corinthians 6:2).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We see that Paul understands this in a most beautiful paragraph from his Second Letter to the Corinthians. He says, \u201cWe with our unveiled faces will gradually reflect like mirrors the brightness of the Lord. All will grow brighter and brighter as we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect\u201d (3:18). That\u2019s it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It doesn\u2019t have to do with being perfect. <strong>It has to do with being in relationship, holding onto union as tightly as God holds onto us, staying in there.<\/strong> The one who knows all and receives all, as a mirror does, has no trouble forgiving all. <strong>It\u2019s not a matter of being correct, but of being connected.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"500\" height=\"310\" src=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image-500x310.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20878\" srcset=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image-500x310.png 500w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image-300x186.png 300w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image-768x476.png 768w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/image.png 1802w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We Are Made for Love Today we begin another year\u2019s journey of Daily Meditations together. Our 2022 theme is \u201cNothing Stands Alone\u201d\u2014because the very nature of God and reality is relationship! Father Richard reflects:\u00a0 The Christian belief in the Trinity says that God is absolute relatedness. God is our word for&nbsp;the ultimate ecosystem&nbsp;that holds all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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\/20876"}],"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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20876"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20880,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20876\/revisions\/20880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}