I think what modern men and women lack is a deep sense of belonging. That sense of belonging is given to you by God from your very birth, and then it is mirrored to you in the natural world—if you are looking and listening. In nature you can overcome your sense of separateness or alienation—and know you are a part of the whole. If Franciscan spirituality means anything it is founded on a very positive image of human nature and all of creation, “original blessing” instead of original sin.
There is a kind of therapy that I’d like to call “proactive” therapy, in which you don’t try to heal your wounds afterwards. Instead, you rely on your inherent connection with everything and are healed ahead of time into a kind of “hidden wholeness,” as Thomas Merton called it. I call it “the Unified Field,” or as Gerard Manley Hopkins called it “the dearest freshness deep down things.” Inside of the Unified Field you find that it is a good world and you also are inherently good, not because you are independently perfect (you never will be!), but because you belong to the Whole—that is always and deeply good and perfect in its Wholeness (the pleroma, or “fullness” of Colossians 1:19-20). To live inside of such fullness is what it means to be a Franciscan.
From In the Footsteps of Francis: Awakening to Creation webcast(CD, DVD, MP3
Richard Rohr
Let's give thanks for belonging to the Whole, and in that gratitude, let us open ourselves to the fullness.
May you walk in Wholeness this day,
Blessings
Lori Megley-Best
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