*Love, in the divine sense, is the giving of one's whole being to another, and when we say that God is love we mean that God gives God's entire infinite Self to every single object of God's love, to every creature that God has made. Of course the gift is received in varying degrees by different creatures as the light of the sun, shed with equal brilliance upon all parts of the earth, is reflected more perfectly by a mirror than by a brick. Humankind can reflect God's love more perfectly than an animal. To reflect it with absolute perfection, one would have to be God.  But while the degrees of reception differ, the gift is always infinite in fullness.  To humankind and to atom, to star-cloud and to earth, to sun and to snow crystal, to mountain and to worm, to sage and to food, to saint and to sinner, God, to whom size and number offer no obstacle, gives eternal and inescapable union with God's very Self.  For in God to exist, to create, to love and to redeem are all one pure and simple act; they are God's Self.  And the gift of union with God's own Self is the Logos, the eternal Word, incarnate in history and incarnate in the souls and bodies of people as Christ.
-Alan Watts

*Self Portrait

again

I am

interrupted

fallen from a frame

too tight to welcome

wonder and without

patience

to wait until nothing

remains

resting on a silence

ready

to perform

for the first time

again

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.