We are the masks of God!

At Yellowstone this past weekend, I had some meaningful retreat time while relaxing at our secluded forest campsite. After meditating and journaling each morning, I did some reading in a new book entitled "What the Mystics Know" by Franciscan friar Richard Rohr. Here is one of the passages that I found myself pondering over the weekend:

"The Judeo-Christian tradition would see all human personhood as real and organic participation in the one personhood that is God. In other words, the human self has no meaning or substance apart from the Selfhood of God. We are the masks of God, and we play out God's image in myriad human ways. The immense problem we are facing in a secular society is that we do not know we are the masks of God. We are therefore condemned to creating our own significance, our own legitimation, our own mask and personhood. This makes us - like atoms - inherently unstable. When we do not see our lives as a participation in Another, we are forced to manufacture our own private significance. Contemporary psychology had to create a word for this: 'ego.' It is the atomized self, the small self, the false self, which does not really 'exist' at all. In such a state of insecurity, it overdefends itself and overdefines itself. We call this the imperial ego, and it is the basis for all illusion and all evil . . . "

The magical, ethereal, mystical landscape of Yellowstone is, I discovered, the perfect place to pierce through the beautiful mask-like surface of the Earth in order to see the sacred Presence - which in this analogy, is the magma and immense heat originating several miles below - dwelling deep within all things!

Photos: (Top) West Thumb Geyser Basin; (Second) Orange thermophile algae and bacteria mats emanating from The Grand Prismatic Spring; (Third) Bison in Hayden Valley, with Mount Washburn looming in the distance; (Bottom) Changing Aspen leaves in the Midway Geyser Basin. All four photos were taken at Yellowstone National Park, WY, on September 6-7, 2015