Dear Friends,
We are on the eve of one of the most turbulent, suffering and deadliest years in history. Many people have lost loved ones to the pandemic, other diseases or accidents in 2020; many have lost jobs or have been displaced due to economic disasters; and millions have suffered social, psychological and emotional earthquakes due to COVID-19. How we enter the New Year of 2021 will affect how the future unfolds. Will we remain fearful, depressed, anxious and skeptical, or will we turn our hearts over and allow the energies of love to nurture our lives in the moments we are given?
How shall we enter into 2021? First, it is good to keep in mind that the human person is the quintessential mystery of the universe. We are a mystery to ourselves and God is a mystery to us. Do not let the mystery of the unknown hold you back from life (as if we could actually control the events of our lives!) Engage the mystery by living into it. We are space-time-mattering beings, each a partial of the whole universe, open to divinity and infinity; we create the universe by our thinking-acting lives. The sheer openness of the unknown, therefore, invites us to live with creativity, spontaneity, lives of adventure, daring to live by doing old things in new ways or, perhaps, new things in new ways.
Now is the time to live, to wonder, to dream new dreams, to hope, to be a bit crazy at times, to turn off the routine road of life and try a new path. Nothing can be more depressing than living like a machine: routine, predictable sameness of closed, bounded existence. Machines wear out but living things move on. Life feeds on creativity and adventure because God is creativity and adventure. So be Godly, be wild in love, reach out beyond your comfortable borders. I am sure you will find another human there who is waiting to be loved.
It is time to stop living like we (not so) intelligent humans are in charge or that we can logically structure life. It is time to start living like the universe itself, this wild and wondrous 13.8 billion year-old universe, where the energy that moves the sun and the other stars is divine love. In 2021, the mind must stand in the heart and the heart must rest on the heart of divine love.
Let 2021 bear witness to a new type of person, the ultrahuman, the terrestrian, homo universalis, the person of deep interconnectedness, deep compassion, deep mercy, deep forgiveness and deep creativity. Let us think as the universe and let us love like God. Let thinking be an act of love.
Wishing you a Happy New Year, wherever you live and love on this beautiful planet.
Sr. Ilia
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