Many / One

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Compiled by JoAnn Kite

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Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God
James Finley

1 "Our very being and the very being of everyone and everything around us IS the generosity of God. For God is creating us in the present moment, loving us into being, such that our very presence in the present moment is the manifested presence of God."

2 "It is the love revealed to us in Christ that breaks our heart open and teaches us to listen. Our learning to love as Christ has loved us breaks down the barriers that close us off from ourselves, God, and others."

3 "We can learn to live our ordinary life knowing and trusting that in the midst of it all God ceaselessly joins us to herself."

4 "It's One! The ground I was standing on, the leaf I was touching, the cloud in the sky, God that I was breathing, my own very self – were utterly, completely, ungraspably one!"

5 "Eternal oneness with God IS the very reality of ourselves and of everyone and everything around us."

6 "God is one with all the trees and flowers and weeds that grow along the roadside. God is one with the great mountains of the world and with each tiny grain of sand….God is one with the world and with each thing and person in it."

7 "Jesus taught that we are completely drenched through and through with God's love. In the parable of the prodigal son, in his miracles of healing, in his love for everyone he encountered, his message rang out to one and all: you are drenched through and through with a divine benevolence that gives itself to you whole and complete in and as your very life."

8 "God is giving herself, wholly and completely, in and as the incomprehensible stature of a single breath."

9 "This is what Christ came to reveal: that nothing is missing anywhere. Our very life is itself the manifestation of the union with God we seek."

10 "We simply never know just how far a single act of loving consideration will travel, or the ripple effects it might have on those we have never met."

11 "Each breath is carrying us all the way home into God, from whom each breath comes."

12 "I hear the words read: 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.'….I shall return to my heart and try to understand and find this purity, for this is indeed a precious and desirable thing….It has for its reward the vision of God, which is eternal life." Guigo, 12th century Carthusian monk, 'Ladder of Monks'

13 "We can meditate on a tree or a single flower, or walk in a forest or sit in the mountains, or look at the stars at night, and know that, in some mysterious way, we are looking into the face of God."

14 "There is, in fact, a deep-seated need for us as human beings to get our bearings in our own life, to grow in authentic self-knowledge, so that we can live our lives in a mindful and effective manner."

15 "As we search for God in the writings of the mystics, we can experience in their words something of the experience of God the mystics are writing about."

16 "God loves and is one with the communal preciousness of all that is lost and broken in everyone who lives."

17 "If we could only see ALL that this moment really is, we would see God loving us into being."

18 "There are no walls between you and God, no distance, no separation. Looking out through meditative eyes, you see there is no distance, no separation, from others or from the earth that sustains us all."

19 "We are one with that homeless person we saw going through the trash receptacle. The woman at the local market, the man who comes to check our gas meter, and all who have hurt us, abandoned us, and have otherwise wronged us, along with all the women and men we have never met – we are to realize that we are equally, fully one with every blessed one of them."

20 "Grounded in self-knowledge, I am grounded in awareness of oneness with you at a level that precedes and transcends the differences between us. I know you with an empathic, heartfelt knowledge of what it means to be a human being."

21 "Whatever the specifics of your life might be, the truth is that God, who is love, is within you and all about you, loving you into the present moment."

22 "Each of us is living out of our own unique edition of the one universal story of how we, as human beings, discover and respond to the divine origin and fulfillment of our lives."

23 "You can always choose to open yourself, in the midst of a thousand graces and setbacks, to the oneness with God that is the reality of all that is real."

24 "God is always uniting us to himself in our ordinary experience of our ordinary day-by-day lives."

25 "Every time you compassionately engage with another person, your reason for being on this world in honored and expressed."

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite