Status Updates From Вселенський Христос: Правда...

“We were made to love and trust this world, "to cultivate it and take care of it" (Genesis 2:15), but for some sad reason we preferred to emphasize the statement from Genesis 1, which seems to say that we should "dominate" the earth (1:28). Within one generation we became killers of our brothers (Genesis 4:8).”

“I wrote that great love and great suffering (both healing and woundedness) are the universal, always available paths of transformation, because they are the only things strong enough to take away the ego's protections and pretensions. Great love and great suffering bring us back to God…and I believe this is how Jesus himself walked humanity back to God. It is… always a path that includes death and woundedness.”

“In Franciscan theology, truth is always for the sake of love—and not an absolute end in itself, which too often becomes the worship of an ideology. In other words, any good idea that does not engage the body, the heart, the physical world, and the people around us will tend to be more theological problem-solving and theory than any real healing of people and institutions…”

“For all who have tried to know Jesus without Christ, many of the core church teachings offered a disembodied Christ without any truly human Jesus, which was the norm for centuries in doctrine and in art. Art is the giveaway of what people really believe at any one time.”

“Did you know that the first seven Councils of the Church, agreed upon by both East and West, were all either convened or formally presided over by emperors? This is no small point. Emperors and governments do not tend to be interested in an ethic of love, or service, or nonviolence (God forbid!), and surely not forgiveness unless it somehow helps them stay in power.”

“When our tradition chose an imperial Christ who lives inside the world of static and mythic proclamations, it framed Christian belief and understanding in a very small box. The Christ of these creeds is not tethered to earth-to a real, historical, flesh-and-blood Jesus of Nazareth. … This is what happens when power and empire take over the message.”

“If divine incarnation has any truth to it, then resurrection is a foregone conclusion, and not a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, as our Western understanding of the Resurrection felt it needed to prove and then it couldn't. The Risen Christ is not a one-time miracle but the revelation of a universal pattern that is hard to see in the short run.”

“Your simple breathing models your entire vocation as a human being. You are an incarnation, like Christ, of matter and spirit operating as one. This, more than anything we believe or accomplish, is how all of us continue the mystery of incarnation in space and time-either knowingly and joyfully, or not.”

“If incarnation is real, then resurrection in multitudinous forms is to be fully expected, or, to paraphrase that earlier statement attributed to Albert Einstein, it is not that one thing is a miracle, but that the whole thing is a miracle!”

“I am looking at a sign here in my office right now that says, LIFE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PERFECT TO BE WONDERFUL. The steps toward maturity, it seems, are always and necessarily immature. What else could they be? Good moms and dads learned that a long time ago, and Cardinal John Henry Newman brilliantly captured it when he wrote that "to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often."”

“There is no such thing as a non-political Christianity. To refuse to critique the system or the status quo is to fully support it—which is a political act well disguised. Like Pilate, many Christians choose to wash their hands in front of the crowd and declare themselves innocent, saying with him, "It is your concern" (Matthew 27:24). Pilate maintains his purity and Jesus pays the price.”