“If we look at Jesus–if we truly see what Jesus is about–we will see what God is about. God has to do with love and connection and freedom and compassion and service and reaching out. God is about inclusivity and joy-filled life. God is for healing and forgiveness and reconciliation and peace. God is never beyond our grasp and never deplete of grace or reluctant to bestow it. God is about desire that lets nothing–not even ongoing rejection and lack of understanding–get in the way” (p 110). —Quantum Grace: Lenten Reflections on Creation and Connectedness by Judy Cannato
The year was 2003. The Catholic church was growing more polarized, and the tension grew in me while working in a position of spiritual guidance and leadership. Over years my spirituality shifted to the spirit of the law in contrast to living by the letter of the law. Love and compassion rooted in my core. Cannato’s book of daily reflections for Lent supported my conviction of mutuality and connectedness in complex relationships. A lens of “new physics” was introduced in her writing, and I was grateful. A part of me, from my childhood, had always viewed connections as integral in life and relationships, but as a product of the dominant culture, and working in a patriarchal system, my learned experience was to become loving but primarily concrete, sequential, black and white. I had always been more comfortable with gray zones (something that really bugged my former husband.) So, for a long time I stifled a very important truth within me–compassion rules. The daily reflections and timing of Quantum Grace in Lent 2003 was a healing balm.
“I am dust, to be sure –stardust, if I am to believe what the new physics tells me. My body is made of recycled particles of life shared by whoever or whatever has gone before me. Strictly speaking, we are not dust—we are more energy than solid mass. Such ponderings bring me to the brink of a truth that I cannot fathom in all its depth, but glimpse, as out of the corner of an eye: We are all one—all of creation, all that now love, all that have ever lived. And I am an integral part of that great mystery. That is the revelation and revolution that flows from Christianity. It is God’s call to us, and we are summoned to recognize this truth quite deliberately…” – Judy Cannato
A spiritual director, Cannato died in 2011. She published several more books after Quantum Grace. While looking for this book on my shelf tonight, I came across two other books she wrote, and a third I’ve yet to read: Field of Compassion: How the New Cosmology is Transforming Spiritual Life (2010). It’s now on a stack by my desk.