220: Living from the Gospels with Cara Murphy (Part 2)
“He who loves has his Beloved always in his mind; that time to him is well spent that is spent in contemplating Him, and the time to him is wasted in which He is out of his sight. He counts as profitable only those hours in which he contemplates the only thing that to him has any reality. All else is for him emptiness and nothingness.
Let your soul melt into Mine, immerse yourself in Me, lose yourself in Me. Think how often I have told you to hope for the day when you will lean forever on My breast. And since I allow it, I tell you now to begin to live this life, in silence, lay your head upon My breast, and so accomplish your pilgrimage.”
–Charles de Foucauld
What would it look like to engage both our cognition and our imagination when we encounter the Gospels?
Not just reading the stories, but entering into them. Feeling the dust beneath our feet, hearing the people gathered around Jesus, watching the questions being asked, and experiencing the Kingdom reality breaking into ordinary lives.
Perhaps these two ways of approaching Scripture were never meant to be separated.
In this second part of our conversation with Cara Murphy, we turn toward the Gospels not only as texts to read and sources of knowledge about Jesus and his Kingdom announcement, but as an invitation to encounter him in the present—to behold him more fully and, in the process, become more like the One we behold.
Our apprenticeship to Jesus is not knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The aim is union, participation, and transformation.
And above all, the aim is Love: to receive Love, respond in Love, and move into ever-deeper union with the One who is Love.
How do we become people who increasingly internalize the words, life, heart, and Kingdom of Jesus so that they shape and shift every facet of our perceiving, experiencing, and acting?
The invitation is not to find the perfect plan or manufacture an outcome. It is to make ourselves available to Jesus and trust that he will form us as we immerse ourselves in his Way and his Words, over and over again.
What fascinates you in the life of Jesus? And how might you follow that bright curiosity a little further?
May we become lifelong students of Jesus, holding his Liveliness and Goodness before our minds with increasing fullness and clarity, trusting that as we behold him, we are being formed more and more into his likeness.
It’s all been prologue. The best is yet to come.
For the Kingdom,
Morgan & Cherie