Breathing Underwater

by Richard Rohr

come your way that you cannot manage on your own. Self-made people, and all heroic spiritualities, will try to manufacture an even stronger self by willpower and determination—to put them back in charge and seeming control. Usually most people admire this, not realizing the unbending, sometimes proud, and eventually rigid personality that will be the long-term result. They will then need to continue in this pattern of self-created successes and defenses. This pushy response does not normally create loving people, but just people in control and in ever-deeper need of control. Eventually, the game is unsustainable, unless you make others, even your whole family, pay the price for your own aggression and self-assertion —which is the common pattern.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

W.H. Auden put it in “Apropos of Many Things”: “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.”

Finally, I think the heart space is often opened by “right brain” activities4 such as music, art, dance, nature, fasting, poetry, games, life-affirming sexuality, and, of course, the art of relationship itself. Mass murderers are invariably loners who participate in none of these things but merely ruminate and retreat to their head and their explanations.

“What you resist, persists.”

Who can argue with a sacrificial person? It has driven most of the wars, and the romanticization of war, in all of human history, on both sides. It serves those with power that the common folks all believe mightily in sacrifice, while far too often their own sons and daughters never go to war or work at all. “Personal sacrifice” creates the Olympics and American Idol, many heroic projects, and many wonderful people. It is just not the Gospel, but only its most common substitute.3

With Gospel brilliance and insight, A.A. says that the starting point and, in fact, the continuing point, is not any kind of worthiness at all but in fact unworthiness! (“I am an alcoholic!”)

God resists our evil and conquers it with good, or how could God ask the same of us?! Think about that. God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.

No one catches the wild ass by running after him, yet only those who run after the wild ass ever catch him.

G.K. Chesterton said that paradox is simply truth standing on its head to get our attention!

to fully understand is always to stand under and let things have their way with you.

Take that as a trustworthy axiom. Not heaven later as much as health now—which prepares you for—and becomes—heaven later!

“Anyone who claims to be in the light, but hates his brother or sister, is still in the dark” (1 John 2:9). Until religion becomes flesh, it is merely Platonic idealism instead of Jesus radicalism.

What the Western religions sometimes called “wisdom,” the Eastern religions often called “skillful means.” Wisdom was not a mere aphorism in the head, but a practical, best, and effective way to get the job done! One was either trained in skillful means by a master or parent, or it would be the long laborious school of trial and error, which seems to be the unfortunate pattern today. I am afraid that commonsense wisdom, or skillful means, is no longer common sense. We are a culture with many elderly people but not so many elders passing on wisdom.

But we got so preoccupied with needing to prove and worship Jesus’ divinity that we failed to let him also be a sage, a wise man, a teacher of commonsense spiritual wisdom.

Consciousness is aware of my feelings so it cannot be purely and simply my feelings themselves.

People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren’t.

It is the prayer of quiet and self-surrender that will best allow us to follow Step 11, which Bill W must have recognized by also using the word meditation when that word was not common in Christian circles at all at that time. And he was right, because only contemplative prayer or meditation invades, touches, and heals the unconscious! This is where all the garbage lies—but also where God hides and reveals “in that secret place” (Matthew 6:6). “Do you not know,” Jesus says, “the kingdom of God is within you!” (Luke 17:21).

“The will of God is not a ‘fate’ to which we must submit, but a creative act in our life that produces something absolutely new, something hitherto unforeseen by the laws and established patterns. Our cooperation consists not solely in conforming to external laws, but in opening our wills to this mutually creative act.”5

Suffering people can love and trust a suffering God, Only a suffering God can “save” suffering people, Those who have passed across this chasm can and will save one another.