This morning I went to the beach, with Jesus on my heart, and asked the Spirit to guide me to pieces of wood to fashion a cross for our chapel. I was praying with materials from Richard Rohr’s revolutionary book The Universal Christ, and asking for understanding of the Cosmic Christ. Here is what I was led to create and some quotes that guided me. All quotes are by Richard Rohr.
“What was personified in the body of Jesus was a manifestation of this one universal truth: Matter is, and has always been, the hiding place for Spirit, forever offering itself to be discovered anew.”
Let me put it this way: Christ is a word for the macrocosm, Jesus is the microcosmic moment in time, and all else is the cosmos—including you and me. You inherently belong to Somebody that is going somewhere! This provides ultimate and deep meaning for human existence. It settles the mind, heart, and emotions.”
“Only God can hold both the joy and the pain of creation in us, because our little self is just not strong enough to hold that much together and make sense out of it. The lone individual is far too fragile to bear either ‘the weight of glory’ or the ‘burden of separation.’ … But God in us, uniting us in One corporate Body, does it for us!”
“We eventually know that Someone Else is working through us, in us, for us, and in spite of us. After enlightenment, our life is not our own. Now we draw from the One Big Life, the Christ mystery, the Christ nature, the Christ source. We stop fretting about our smallness. … and can still remain utterly connected if (the individual) stops over-defending itself. Our yes deeply matters. The word for that yes and that connection is, quite simply, love.”