Dear Friends,
We hope that you are safe and well.
Today's Meditation features a reflection by Ilia Delio which I have adapted for this space. It celebrates seeing with the eyes of the heart, becoming a new creation in love.
We invite you to join us as we commit ourselves to working tirelessly to end systemic and structural racism in our society, in the church, in healthcare, in the workplace--wherever it shows up so that everyone may come to have more abundant life. May this meditation nourish our contemplative-active hearts and sustain all of us in action.
In the spirit of our philosophy of co-creating community and our awareness that the Spirit speaks through each of us, we invite you to share your meditations with us as well. We truly believe that it is God's economy of abundance: when we share our blessings, our thoughts, our feelings, we are all made richer.
We hope and pray that you find peace, healing, hope and the infusion of joy in your life!
With our love and care,
Ron and Jean
MEDITATION 709: Ilia Delio: Becoming a New Creation in Love--Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart
Seeing Anew
"By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation,
nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”
-Ilia Delio
+
Seeing with the Heart
Namaste! "The Divine in me sees the Divine in you" Namaste!
The little prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s book by the same name, teaches the author how to see with the heart by saying, “Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
The physical eye only lets in parts of a person, a certain appearance, behavior or speech.That first glance lives on the threshold of the heart but does not enter that inner space where God dwells.
It is easy to like and love those who belong to our human circles, families, churches, countries, political parties. It is easy to see the Divine in those who look like us, think like us, believe like us. But do we see the Divine in “the others”? Do we see them as our brothers and sisters? Are we able to see "beyond" that first glance and discover the Divine in them?
Practice "Seeing with the Heart":
When you notice judgement, anger or even hatred starting to fill up your heart, pause. Breathe. “How I pray is breathe” said Thomas Merton. In that breath, say those words, slowly and quietly within your heart space, “The Divine in me sees the Divine in you”. In that phrase discover your brother or sister in the driver who cut you off, the politician who enrages you, the family member who did you wrong. In that phrase find freedom and give freedom.
Ilia continues: "Love is the core energy of the universe, Teilhard wrote, not the sentimentality of feeling, but the overflow of energy that pulls the heart into creativity and union. The more one exists in love, the more one acts from a center of love. To “ex-ist” is to be present in a way that being flows forth toward more being, the overflow of being toward what is not yet.
Beatrice Bruteau called this dynamic being, “spondic” energy, a spontaneous aliveness, from the Greek word which means “libation.”[i] One who lives with spondic energy lives as interbeing reality, which I would express this way: “I do not exist in order that I may possess; rather, I exist in order that I may give of myself, for it is giving that I am myself.” This self-gift of personhood arises out of a deep center within, where humanity is held by divinity in utter silence and freedom. Spondic energy is an outpouring that is an act of reverence and worship. We experience it as a projection of personal, spiritual, self-existent energy towards and into other persons, and even towards the intrapersonal universe.
To love another, Bruteau states, is a creative act.[ii] We love another not as a static being but as the other is, on the point of coming into existence. The act of living, therefore, is on the interface between the present and the future, not between the present and the past. The person to whom our agapic love, our spondic energy, is directed, is the person who is coming into existence, who stands on the horizon of the future.[iii]
These insights of Beatrice Bruteau remind me of Isabelle. Her emphasis on contemplative practice corresponds to Teilhard’s notion of “seeing,” in so far as what we are is always on the cusp of becoming a new creation. In Teilhard’s vision, to be a person is an ongoing creative act of engagement, open to the future; becoming in love requires an open mind standing in the heart, touching all reality in every moment of experience."
Notes:
[i] Bruteau, “Persons in Communion,” in The Grand Option, 52.
[ii] Bruteau deep insights on evolutionary personhood flow from her profound insights on the God-world relationship. In her essay on “Trinitarian Personhood (in The Grand Option) she writes that “our ‘I,’ our personhood, is not a product of God’s action, something left over after the action has ceased. Rather it is God’s action in the very actuality of acting. ‘We’ are not a thing but an activity. This is why God’s activity of ecstatically moving out to us is an act of coinciding with our activity, just as our union with God will be our ecstatically moving out to God as an act of coinciding with God’s activity. . . .This activity which we are and which God is, is the act of creative freedom, of initiative, of self-originated self-giving” (p. 75).
[iii] Bruteau, “The Living One,” 137.