Against the flow of my constructed self.
Art, Love, Spirit, Oneness.
For some reason known only to better minds than mine – and god – I thought for a long time that unless the language of Christian fundamentalism was clearly stated along with behavioural lifestyles and appearances that school mates, politicians and the local doctor and millions more were all enemies ripe for the conversion picking. That kind of indoctrination is cultic and it takes 73 years to start to unpack it – and more.
Thomas Merton pre the second vatican council under Pope Saint John 23 said this in addressing how to be with neighbours and the spirit of Christ:
“If I allow the Holy Spirit to work in me, if I allow Christ to use my heart in order to love my neighbors with it, I will soon find that Christ loving in me and through me has brought to light Christ in my neighbor. And I will find that the love of Christ in my neighbor, by loving me in return, has drawn forth the image and the reality of Christ in my own soul. This, then, is the mystery of Christ manifesting Himself in the love which no longer regards my neighbor as an object or as a thing, which no longer treats them merely as a friend or an associate, but sees in them the same Lord who is the life of my own soul. Here is a subjectivity that transcends every object of knowledge, because it is not just the climate of our own inner being, the peculiar silence of our own narrow self, but is at once the climate of God and the climate of all. Once we know this, then, we can breathe the sweet air of Christ, a divine air, which is the breath of Christ. This ‘air’ is God —the Holy Spirit.” – Thomas Merton
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