Al Owski’s Reviews > The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe > Status Update

“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“If that mirror is withdrawn for any reason, It causes sadness, emptiness, or even anger.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.”