Breathing Underwater

by Richard Rohr

our society itself shows all the signs of classic addiction. I began to wonder whether addiction could be one very helpful metaphor for what the biblical tradition called “sin.”

How helpful it is to see sin, like addiction, as a disease,

many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self.

It seems we are not that free to be honest, or even aware, because most of our garbage is buried in the unconscious. So it is absolutely essential that we find a spirituality that reaches to that hidden level. If not, nothing really changes.

Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else.

Our inability to see our personal failures is paralleled by our inability to see our institutional and national sins too.

Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called “sin,”

“Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible form of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything,

By definition, you can never see or handle what you are addicted to.

We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.

Until and unless there is a person, situation, event, idea, conflict, or relationship that you cannot “manage,” you will never find the True Manager.

The ego always insists on moral high ground, or as Paul brilliantly puts it, “sin takes advantage of commandments to mislead me, and through obeying commandments kills me”

Albert Einstein frequently said in a different way: No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused the problem in the first place.

Letting go is not in anybody’s program for happiness, and yet all mature spirituality, in one sense or another, is about letting go and unlearning.

Meister Eckhart said, the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition.

The surrender of faith does not happen in one moment but is an extended journey, a trust walk, a gradual letting go, unlearning, and handing over.

“Religion is lived by people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is lived by people who have been through hell.”

Peter will say, “God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean”

To be present is to know what you need to know in the moment. To be present to something is to allow the moment, the person, the idea, or the situation to change you.

When you can let others actually influence you and change you, your heart space is open.

It is very telling that Jesus usually physically touched people when he healed them; he knew where the memory and hurt was lodged, and it was in the body itself.

the Christian religion was the only one that believed God became a human body,

So the work of spirituality is the ongoing liberation of head, heart, and body,

Those who can be present with head, heart, and body at the same time will always encounter The Presence, whether they call it God or not.

“God comes to us disguised as our life,” as spiritual writer and retreat leader Paula D’Arcy so beautifully puts it in her talks and retreats.

“May the God of peace make you whole and holy, may you be kept safe in body, heart, and mind, and thus ready for the presence. God has called you and will not fail you” (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

Surrender will always feel like dying, and yet it is the necessary path to liberation.

“What you resist, persists.”

Islam even means “surrender”

compunction, the necessary sadness and humiliation that comes from seeing one’s own failures and weaknesses.

People only come to deeper consciousness by intentional struggles with contradictions, conflicts, inconsistencies, inner confusions, and what the biblical tradition calls “sin” or moral failure.

the goal is actually not the perfect avoidance of all sin, which is not possible anyway (1 John 1:8–9; Romans 5:12), but the struggle itself, and the encounter and wisdom that comes from it.

Your shadow self is not your evil self. It is just that part of you that you do not want to see, your unacceptable self by reason of nature, nurture, and choice.

evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful.

God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.

“Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past.” It is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, as long as there is also accountability and healing in the process.

It seems we must both surrender and take responsibility.

Grace will always favor the prepared mind. Maybe we can sum it up this way: God is humble and never comes if not first invited, but God will find some clever way to get invited.

God gives us power more than answers.

A daily and chosen “attitude of gratitude” will keep your hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think you deserve it.

All healers are wounded healers, as Henri Nouwen said so well.

the geometry of the cross should tell us that we need both dimensions, the vertical and the horizontal.

To offer an apology in a way that can actually heal the other takes wisdom and respect for the other.

the Roman Church presuming we did not know Scripture. It always quotes Matthew 16:19 where the power of “binding and loosing” is given to Peter and never points out that two chapters later in Matthew 18:18, Jesus says the same thing to the whole community, and now even introduces it by an “I tell you solemnly.”

Some things are not everybody’s business—not even the confessor’s.

“Not everybody has a right to know everything” is a moral principle that our culture would be wise to learn.

The Twelve Steps are about two things: making amends and keeping us from wounding one another further.

Now many of the Jesuits recommend instead an “examination of consciousness,” which to me feels much more fruitful.

Consciousness is not the seeing but that which sees me seeing. It is not the knower but that which knows that I am knowing. It is not the observer but that which underlies and observes me observing.

Ken Wilber describes it beautifully as “the simple feeling of Being” underneath all of our perceptions, and yet so simple and subtle and always there that it is hard to “feel,” I would add.