Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city…"

“This leads me to end with a spectacular thought from St Augustine, which I hope can still resolve our many problems of unity and diversity and embolden all ecumenical and interfaith understanding into the distant future. Read and reread my paraphrase of Augustine's quote until you get it, and until it touches everything you once thought of as profane: "Christians, you are Christ... for there is but One Son of God"”

“Jesus Christ is a Sacrament of the Presence of God for the whole universe!”

“Maybe the Antichrist is much less a person than an attitude—and, unfortunately, an attitude that is quite common among many Christians! In my understanding, John is saying here that the Christ is the Universal Standing Symbol for what most people with their dualistic mind find hard to imagine or even appreciate—Matter and Spirit mirror one another and reveal the depths of one another.”

“You can tell the spirit that comes from God by this: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus the Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and any spirit which will not say this of Jesus Christ is not from God, but is the spirit of the Antichrist (1 John 4:2-3).”

“The call then becomes one toward universal solidarity with the full Christ journey rather than our usual habits of counting, weighing, or measuring individual worthiness or unworthiness. This is a very different message, which would create a very different notion of church and Gospel.”

“Rugged individualism has pretty much decimated the transformative power of the Gospel. The lone and fragile individual can do nothing but fear God in this world and the next, whereas the intent of the Gospel was to draw us together into a communion of saints and sinners in this world where we bear the burden of life together.”

“The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome.”

“You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of the human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive.” –Simone Weil

“The universe is relational at every level, and even between levels. Relationship is the core and foundational shape of Reality, Mirroring our Trinitarian God (Genesis 1:26-27). Every object serves as a mirror, another kind of presence. You can find such mirrors in all of nature, in animals. In your parents, lovers, children, books, pictures, movies.”

“If that mirror is withdrawn for any reason, It causes sadness, emptiness, or even anger. We are normally disoriented, even heartbroken for a while. We die in some way. But why? Because we only know ourselves in another's eyes. We receive our identity—all of it, good and bad—From another. The other both creates us and saves us. "No man is an island, entire of itself," says the poet John Donne.”

“In this resonance, we literally come to life.”

“When we learn to love anyone or anything, It is because they have somehow, if just for a moment, Mirrored us truthfully yet compassionately to ourselves.”

“The outer world is a sacrament of God.”

“I like this practice because it can become a very embodied experience of what we've been talking about in this whole book. Your own body–in its naked being, with no "doing" involved becomes the place of revelation and inner rest. Christ becomes "despiritualized."”

“"Don't focus on what you are, but simply that you are! How hopelessly stupid would a person have to be if he or she could not realize that he or she simply is. Hold…these loving words against your bodily self, bypass the mind and even the affections of the heart, and forgo any analysis of what you are, or are not.”

“All these practices have one thing in common: they are acted out, mimed, embodied expressions of spirit. The soul remembers them at an almost pre conscious level because they are lodged in our muscle memory and make a visual impact. The later forms of rational Protestantism had a hard time understanding this. ”

“These outer images serve as mirrors of the Absolute, which can often bypass the mind. Anything is a sacrament if it serves as a shortcut to the Infinite, but it will always be hidden in something that is very finite.”

“Before the age of literacy emerged, in the 16th century, things like pilgrimage, prayer beads, body prostrations, bows and genuflections, "blessing" oneself with the sign of the cross, statues, sprinkling things with holy water, theatrical plays and liturgies, incense, and candles all allowed the soul to know itself through the outer world, which we have in this book dared to call "Christ." ”

“The human need for physical, embodied practices is not new. Across Christian history, the "Sacraments," as Orthodox and Catholics call them, have always been with us.”

“Whatever you choose, it will feel more like unlearning than learning, more like surrendering than accomplishing. This is probably why so many resist contemplation to begin with. Because it feels more like the shedding of thoughts in general than attaining new or good ones. It feels more like just letting go than accomplishing anything, which is counterintuitive…”

“To get out of your programming is a big part of what we mean by "consciousness." Foundationally, we must find a prayer form that actually invades our unconscious, or nothing changes at any depth. Usually this will be some form of centering prayer, walking meditation, inner practices of letting go, shadow work, or deliberately undergoing a longer period of silence as I did while writing the first draft of this book…”

“Until you know what your own flow feels like, you do not even know that there is such a thing. And you must also learn to recognize how resistance feels. Does it take the form of blame, anger, fear, avoidance, projection, denial, an urge to pretend? You want to spot the clever ways that you personally push back from daily reality, or they will run your life—and you will never spot them.”

“Practice is standing in the flow, whereas theory and analysis observe the flow from a position of separation. Practice is looking out from yourself, analysis is looking back at yourself as if you were an object. You may learn something intellectually through analysis, but in doing so, you might actually create a disconnect from your deeper inner experience.”

“Each time you offer the surrender… your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath. You decide not to push yourself to the front of the line, and something much better happens in the back of the line. You let go of your narcissistic anger, and you find that you start feeling much happier. You surrender your need to control your partner, and finally the relationship blossoms.”

“In other words, the only trustworthy pattern of spiritual transformation is death and resurrection. Christians learn to submit to trials because Jesus told us that we must "carry the cross" with him. Buddhists do it because the Buddha very directly said that "life is suffering," but the real goal is to choose skillful and necessary suffering over what is usually just resented and projected suffering.”

“Both Christianity and Buddhism are saying that the pattern of transformation, the pattern that connects, the life that Reality offers us is not death avoided, but always death transformed.”

“…many Buddhists understood Jesus's words very well: "Unless the single grain of wheat falls into the ground, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit" (John 12:24). In fact, they might have understood this message more concretely and immediately than we Christians did! Such daily and "necessary suffering" is the price of both enlightenment for the self and compassion for others.”