For Further Reflection:

I encourage you to spend some time in further reflection on this theme. Below are some of the quotes from the talk and additional quotes for you to take this theme further.

Colossians 1:27

 "...the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in us, the hope of glory".

Richard Rohr: 

"Long before Jesus’s personal incarnation, Christ was deeply embedded in all things—as all things!"

Hildegard of Bingen: 

“The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.”

Thomas Merton: 

"This “I” is Christ living in us: and we, in Christ, living in the Father (Source)."

Martin Laird: 

"Christ is not considered to be an object of awareness, but the reason why awareness is becoming more luminous."

Matthew 5:14,15 

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bushel. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.”

Rumi: 

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against love.

Ilie Cioara: 

"Attentive and lucid, the whole being is like a flame, spreading light, extended into Infinity."

Jean Yves-Leloup: 

"The Shabbat is a moment of halting our churning mental apparatus, when time is suspended . . . Then it is possible for a flame to burn from the heart of humanity, an echo of the pure and simple I AM."

Jean Yves-Leloup: 

"The early Christians saw the fire in the Christ as a return of the fire of the burning bush. To approach the Christ is to approach the fire and to hear the same voice of the unnamable: I AM. If that fire burns us, it is because we have not yet become fire ourselves. The only cure … is to become the Christ—in other words, to make room for the Christ to manifest inside us, to allow our dry, dead wood to catch fire, burst into flames, and shine like the light of the Pentecost."

Thomas Merton:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.”