“Creation became for Francis [of Assisi] the Body of Christ, a Eucharistic earth, with each creature expressing divine beauty in a unique and irreproducible way"
--Ilia Delio. OSF
There is a strong theological movement within the Catholic Christian Tradition
that recognizes the existence of the divine within all of creation. It is an
extension of the theological principle of the “incarnation” of God into the human
world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who is believed to be the Son of God.
In current Catholic theological thinking, The Body of Christ is not just in the
bread and the wine at the Thanksgiving celebration, called the Eucharist, but in
every bird, insect, mineral rock, rabbit and vegetable. Christ is present in every
animal, every creature, because everything is created by the Source of Life.
The Sankhya Yoga philosophy also recognizes the presence of the divine in all of
creation. In fact, all of creation, called “Prakriti,” is the divine in the Sankhya
Yoga tradition.
This awareness, once a person begins to understand it, changes one’s entire life.
We begin to look at life very differently. Our own bodies begin to take on a reality
of sacredness. We begin to make them as beautiful as the flowers of the earth.
Maybe that is why there is such a strong cultural movement and attention to
physical beautiful in our world today. Maybe that is why people want to make
their gardens wonderful to see and the vegetables they eat as pesticide- and
insecticide-free as possible.
If all of creation, as both of these traditions espouse, is sacred, then why do we
act so violently toward it? Why do we take off the tops of mountains for our
source of energy? Why do we deplete the soil with microbe-killing poisons?
Yoga says that it is because of our four basic urges and desires to control our
world instead of participate with it in its unfolding. We have forgotten how to
cooperate with Prakriti and its natural ways. Until recently, Christians used to
think that dominating the earth was the human purpose, instead of being
stewards of life on Earth.
Living this new relationship with creation is very challenging because it means
changing our living patterns and human systems that are deeply engrained in us.
It means not “sinning,” as Christians would say, or changing our “samskaras”
(internal habits), as Yoga would say. Christianity encourages a person to pray
and ask for forgiveness and establish stronger will-power to overcome the
temptations of sin in our lives. Yoga gives a very specific tools to enable the
mind to change its habitual longings. The main tool is mantra meditation—the
stilling of the mind by repeating a word or phrase which brings the mind back to
one-pointedness, thus detaching the mind from the old pattern.
Faithful practice to meditating will renew our relationship with the divinity within
creation because it will renew our relationship with the divinity within ourselves.
This is our work – a transforming practice of getting back in touch with the Body
of the Divine, the Body of Christ.
I bow to the divinity within you!
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