Traveling Light Relay

people who have faces

• In calling forth such freedom and consciousness, and even love, in humanity, God is actually making possible a certain kind of equality between Divinity and humanity, as strange and impossible as that might sound. As Deuteronomy states it, God is creating “a people peculiarly his own” (26:18)
• pattern in the Bible: (1) We start with tribal thinking; (2) we gradually move toward individuation through the dialogue of election, failure and grace; (3) then there is a breakthrough to unitive consciousness
• (1) Simple Consciousness, (2) Complex Consciousness and (3) Non-Dual Consciousness or “the unitive way.”
• We all fear and avoid intimacy, it seems. It is too powerful and demands that we also “have faces,” that is, self-confidence, identity, dignity and a certain courage to accept our own unique face — and then even worse — that once we have it, to be willing to give it away to another.
• Not ready for presence. We settle for tribal customs, laws and occupations as our identity
• How we relate to God always reveals how we will relate to people, and how we relate to people is an almost infallible indicator of how we relate to God and let God relate to us
• “you shall have one god before you” (exodus 20:3)
• people are first defined in families and why most are called to marriage, because that sets the stage, gives you some grounding for relationship in general.
• By putting “one God before you,” you were placed inside of one coherent world, with one center, one pattern, one realm of meaning
• being possessed
• one way to think of “being possessed” is when there is an unhealthy other who is defining you, and defining you poorly. It’s when a negative projection or agenda has captured you and you have internalized it either consciously or unconsciously.
• When a holy person or totally accepting person becomes your chosen and choosing mirror, you are in fact healed!
• “the face of the other” that transforms us, converts us and gives us our deepest identity
• respect for mystery allows presence
• Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable! It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never totally admits to closure or resolution
• The really great truths, like love and “inner freedom, are not fully conceptual, and they can never be understood by reason alone
• presence
• The mystery of presence is that encounter wherein the self-disclosure of one evokes a deeper life in the other
• why falling in love is so exciting. Suddenly the very eyes of the other receiving me, delighting in me, enjoying me and looking at me — make me feel like me, and my best me!
• The lover can say that it’s as if I never knew myself until you knew me, or it’s as if I never could accept myself until you accepted me
• If you can learn how to receive the perfect gaze of the Other, to be mirrored by the Other, then the voices of the human crowd, even negative ones, have little power to hurt you
• Standing humbly before God’s no only unites the psyche but it does the very thing that I know when I teach contemplative prayer. It unifies desire
• As Saint Francis is supposed to have said, “Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words.”
• not to talk about Jesus, as much as trying to be Jesus! That’s how you pass on the gaze
• A true Christian is invariably someone who has met a true Christian
• “How good of you, God, to make truth a relationship instead of an idea. Now there is room between you and me for growth, for conversation, for exception, for the infinite understandings”
• you feel so much more in control when you are right than when you are in right relationship
• We can remain seemingly in control; we can live in our heads; we can avoid loving in general or loving anyone in particular
• inclusive language for god
• If you’ve ever been in love, whether between adults or between parents and children, you know you Find special little words for each other, little nicknames that you like to call one another that somehow express the specialness that just exists between the two of you