Chapter 59. As me

The space in between everything is not space at all but Spirit. 

God is the "Goodness Glue" that holds the dark and light of things together, the free energy that carries all death across the Great Divide and transmutes it into Life.

In early 2016 I am thinking about “good”: what is good, being good, making (people, situations, moments) good, looking for good.

“Find the good in all” is my mantra. These words of Rohr’s, that I read, resonate with me:

“Your task is to find the good, the true, and the beautiful in everything,

even and most especially the problematic.”

It seems to me that finding the good, for me, is good. Being attentive to – looking earnestly for – the good is a healthful, holy, desirable focus.

I tend to distort a focus on good toward trying hard to be good.

On March 23, 2016, my enneathought said this –

“Pay attention to all the little ways you try to “do the right thing.

Do you straighten things as you go by?

Do you hold yourself in by how you dress, how you breathe, how you move?

Do you try to shut down “bad” feelings and thoughts?

Today notice why you think your constant efforts to be good are necessary.”

-          The Wisdom of the Enneagram, 107

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Why do I think I must strive to be good?  Because I still feel I need to prove my worth? Because I must order my behavior toward “good” to BE good, since it’s not my deeply held belief that I AM good?

Note to self: there is significant difference between finding the good and trying to be good. Instead of trying so hard to be good, I can look for the good in all – including me. Embrace my goodness. God is Good, calls God’s creation good, God made me. God lives in me, even lives AS me. That is good!

“I live inside my own heart.”

- Prince

My journey of understanding my relationship with the divine has progressed something like this --

God is for me 

   (Christ died for ungodly Rom 5:6, God is for us Rom 8:31, God fights for you Ex 14:14),

God is with me 

   (I am with you always Matt 28:20),

God is in me 

   (the Spirit lives in you Rom 8:11, John 14:7, one God above all things, through all things, in all things Ephesians 4:6),

God is as me 

   (in God we live and move and have our being Acts 17:28).

The divine as me. Even IS me?

“Both Franciscan John Duns Scotus and Dominican Thomas Aquinas said Deus est Ens,

God is Being itself.

The mystery of cosmic incarnation, when taken to its theological conclusion, leads us to enjoy a very real participation in the same single state of Being, to varying degrees and with different qualities. This eliminates any radical distinction between things, peoples, and creatures because Christ existed in all matter from the first moment of the Big Bang.

Remember, "There is only Christ! He is everything and he is in everything" (Colossians 3:11). 

Now astrophysics tells us that the same molecules which existed at the beginning are still reshaping the universe now into endlessly new forms.

All those songs about you being stardust are quite literally true.”

 –Richard Rohr, Nov 3, 2015 email