The Heart of Matter

A Weekly Reflection from the Center for Christogenesis

A Contemplative Email Series
Offered Weekly, Every Tuesday

Introduction & Purpose

The Heart of Matter is a new contemplative email series from the Center for Christogenesis.

Designed to deepen both the reader’s understanding and their spiritual practice, each weekly email will focus on a passage of Ilia’s work that expands the Center’s vision, while providing practical instruction to move these insights from the head to the heart. Through sustained contemplation on the intellectual import and spiritual potency of these passages, your understanding and practice will expand.

Each weekly email will also be posted below in the Weekly Reflection sections, where you can browse back through previous reflections, as well as share comments and engage in discussion with the Center for Christogenesis community. We invite you to share your challenges, experiences, and breakthroughs with us and with each other. Only together will we transform our world and increase the love at the heart of the universe.

Learn more by clicking on the Deepening Your Understanding and Deepening Your Practice headers below, or sign up to receive the weekly series in your inbox.

Deepening Your Understanding

Every Tuesday we will email you a passage from one of Ilia’s books to ponder. The temptation is great to jump from one quote to another, from one reading to another without truly visiting, without taking the time to get to know what those words bring to our own, unique, always unfolding journey. So our invitation to you will be to read those passages each day during that week to discover their untapped riches.

What is being revealed? What is being moved? What is being asked? This can be challenging because those quotes will be short and seemingly straightforward but staying with them longer will break them open to new growths. This will be an opportunity to meet something in the text that nourishes and challenges, something to wrestle with and grow into. Day after day let those words open your heart and guide you.

Deepening Your Practice

Too often we live in a dissociated state, where what happens in the head stays in the head. “The Heart of Matter” will attempt to bridge that separation by presenting different incarnational practices to “embody” those weekly readings. What shape can the body give to a text? Reading it aloud let the voice, with its cadence, intonation and pauses, lift it off the page and make it vibrate with vocal energy; walking with it let each step move the words to ever deeper resonances. By using our physical senses, those practices will ground the words within and guide us moving forward into the world. The body understands and grasps what the mind alone cannot and our hope is that those readings and those practices will open our hearts to a deeper intentional daily living.

Knowledge without practice remains “heady” and far from becoming transformative.The practices introduced to read the text have one aim and that is to deepen the understanding of the text. Those practices can also be used to read Scriptures, poetry, even secular texts as a way to counterbalance our time’s propensity to read quickly and remain at the surface of things.

“This series is excellent. It really brings in the matter-energy that we are—how those words on a page that convey insight, get translated or transformed into our active energy body.”

Ilia Delio

Founder, Center for Christogenesis