I watched and listened to the words in this video clip, Merton speaks to all of us who understand the Universal Christ, and the journey we all take in the modern world as a path of contemplation, and as Merton says “God is in all and is all.” The last four minutes are at least for me significant, I heard him say those words over a course of a year and a half, but only now I realize what they mean.

I realize we are called to be prophets. We see God in the world around us and in us…this in itself should be our driving force to do the difficult, to lead and educate those we encounter. Collaboration is the key to discipleship.

As we come to understand the essence of the Universal Christ, the incarnation, and the Role, Eesponsibility and Relationship (I call it the # Rs) we have as human beings we come to see and understand our obligation to help the poor, arises from that radical notion ‘to love one’s neighbor as one’s self’, this should cause us to think about what is the highest priority….What action do we take as believers? What are the social and economic implications for us as global citizens? What do we do locally and nationally to organize our society to understand what it means to live poor? To look at our world and the environment we live in as described in Laudato Si and its implication for the poor?

Dualism which is extremely pervasive in our American Culture permeates it wasy into our Western Christianity.  Dualism sustains poverty, to ‘to love one’s neighbor as one’s self,’ should break through the ‘them’ and ‘us’ attitude that dualism provides.

Richard Rohr writes: “The opposite of Faith is not doubt; the opposite of Faith is Control…”

I think we can do this by starting in our neighborhoods, our parishes/churches/temples, we need together to innovate, educate, and collaborate together before the change occurs.

The gospels call us to action and contemplation. When we study the early church, we see a church where all the members educated each other and the community they lived in, education begets collaboration and produces action. With all the technology we have in our world, education should not be a constraint.