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Your True Self is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26). Your essence, your exact “thisness,” will never appear again in another incarnation.
You (and every other created thing) begin with a divine DNA, an inner destiny as it were, an absolute core that knows the truth about you, a blueprint tucked away in the cellar of your being, an imago Dei that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself. As it says in Romans (5:5), “It is the Holy Spirit poured into your heart, and it has been given to you.”
John Duns Scotus
(1265-1308), the Franciscan philosopher, called each soul a unique “thisness” (haecceity), and he said it was to be found in every act of creation in its singularity. For him, God did not create universals, genera, and species, or anything that needed to come back again and again to get it right (reincarnation), but only specific and unique incarnations of the Eternal Mystery—each one chosen, loved, and preserved in existence as itself—by being itself. And this is the glory of God!
Adapted from
Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, pp. 16-18
The Daily Meditations for 2013 are now available
in Fr. Richard’s new book Yes, And . . . .
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