{"id":20931,"date":"2022-01-31T10:57:38","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T15:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=20931"},"modified":"2022-01-31T10:57:38","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T15:57:38","slug":"a-school-of-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=20931","title":{"rendered":"A School of Relationship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Father Richard\nopens this week\u2019s meditations by sharing his early love of the Scriptures: <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Bible first opened up for me in the 1960s when the\nSecond Vatican Council said that divine revelation was not God disclosing ideas\nabout God but God actually disclosing Godself. Scripture and religion became\nnot mere doctrines or moralisms for me, but love-making, a mutual exchange of\nbeing and intimacy<em>. <\/em>The marvelous anthology of books and letters called the\nBible is for the sake of <em>a love affair between God and the soul and\ncorporately between God and history<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We could say that the original blueprint for everything\nthat exists is relationship. John\u2019s word for that was <em>Logos <\/em>(John\n1:1). In other words, the first blueprint for reality was relationality. It is\nall of one piece. How we relate to God reveals how we eventually relate to\neverything else. And how we relate to the world is how we are actively relating\nto God, whether we know it or not (1 John 4:20). How we do anything is how we\ndo everything!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Thus, we must read the whole Bible as a school of\nrelationship. The Bible is slowly making humanity capable of living inside of\nwhat Charles Williams (1886\u20131945) called \u201cco-inherence.\u201d [1] All creation is in\nthe end drawn and seduced into the Great Co-inherence. \u201cI shall return to take\nyou with me, so that where I am you also may be too,\u201d Jesus says (John 14:3).\nSalvation is giving us a face capable of receiving the dignity of the divine\ngaze, and then daring to think that we could gaze back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I believe that we can only safely read Scripture\u2014which is\na dangerous book in the wrong hands\u2014if we are somehow sharing in the divine\ngaze of love. A life of prayer helps us develop a third eye that can read\nbetween the lines and find the golden thread which is moving toward inclusivity,\nmercy, and justice. A hardened heart, a predisposition to judgment, a fear of\nGod, any need to win or prove ourselves right will corrupt and distort the most\ninspired and inspiring of Scriptures\u2014just as they pollute every human\nconversation and relationship. Hateful people will find hateful verses to\nconfirm their obsession with death. Loving people will find loving verses to\ncall them into an even greater love of life. And both kinds of verses are in\nthe Bible!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The late Christian author\nRachel Held Evans encourages reading the Bible with a willingness to engage in\nthe mutual process of inspiration: <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Inspiration is not about some disembodied ethereal voice\ndictating words or notes to a catatonic host. It\u2019s a collaborative process, a\nholy give-and-take, a partnership between Creator and creator. . . . God is\nstill breathing. The Bible is both inspired and inspiring. Our job is to ready\nthe sails and gather the embers, to discuss and debate, and like the biblical\ncharacter Jacob, to wrestle with the mystery until God gives us a blessing.\n[2]&nbsp; [<em>I could not agree more and it saddens me that more do not see what\nRachel so clearly saw. \u2014Richard<\/em>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Father Richard opens this week\u2019s meditations by sharing his early love of the Scriptures: The Bible first opened up for me in the 1960s when the Second Vatican Council said that divine revelation was not God disclosing ideas about God but God actually disclosing Godself. Scripture and religion became not mere doctrines or moralisms 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":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20931"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20932,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20931\/revisions\/20932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}