Day 478 Wednesday, July 7th 2021

A peek into our next celebration by Dan Vrooman and words from wise woman Cynthia Bourgeault

From Dan for our next Emmaus celebration on Sunday July 11th:

A sower went out to sow. This image of a generous and tireless sower reminds me of the beautiful story told by the paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. The scientific storyteller lets us participate in the fascinating discovery of the Burgess fauna in the Western Canadian Rockies, an exceptional site of fossilized invertebrates, where our eyes are opened by how life’s creativity and imagination run wild and free.

In this fossilized episode of evolution we discover that nature generated a wonderful surplus of organisms with the most fanciful forms, as if Life wanted to explore many possibilities “until a gifted species, rich with promise, emerged.

And there is the energy of love at the heart of every seed, - it’s there, it’s the God in us.

Dan Vrooman suggested I take a look at the work of wise woman Cynthia Bourgeault who is from The Wisdom School in New Mexico. Here are a few pearls of her wisdom:

“Jesus never asked anyone to form a church, ordain priests, develop elaborate rituals and institutional cultures, and splinter into denominations.

His two great requests were that we “love one another as I have loved you” and that we share bread and wine together as an open channel of that interabiding love.”

― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

“As we actually taste the flavor of what he's teaching, we begin to see that it's not proverbs for daily living, or ways of being virtuous. He's proposing a total meltdown and recasting of human consciousness, bursting through the tiny acorn-selfhood that we arrived on the planet with into the oak tree of our fully realized personhood. He pushes us toward it, teases us, taunts us, encourages us, and ultimately walks us there.”

― Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind