More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Richard Rohr
Read between
October 27 - November 4, 2023
All spiritual language is by necessity metaphor and symbol.
Each thing and every person must act out its nature fully, at whatever cost. It is our life's purpose, and the deepest meaning of “natural law.”
The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.
What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. —CARL JUNG
The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.
Most of us are never told that we can set out from the known and the familiar to take on a further journey. Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life. Shocking and disappointing, but I think it is true. We are more struggling to survive than to thrive, more just “getting through” or trying to get to the top than finding out what is really at the top or was already at the bottom. Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life
...more
One of the best-kept secrets, and yet one hidden in plain sight, is that the way up is the way down. Or, if you prefer, the way down is the way up.
Some kind of falling, what I will soon call “necessary suffering,” is programmed into the journey. All the sources seem to say it, starting with Adam and Eve and all they represent. Yes, they “sinned” and were cast out of the Garden of Eden, but from those very acts came “consciousness,” conscience, and their own further journey. But it all started with transgression. Only people unfamiliar with sacred story are surprised that they ate the apple. As soon as God told them specifically not to, you know they will! It creates the whole story line inside of which we can find ourselves.
You cannot avoid sin or mistake anyway (Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems.
No one would choose such upheaval consciously; we must somehow “fall” into it.
We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.
A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.
The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.
Like skaters, we move forward by actually moving from side to side.
Remember, the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this. The transrational has the capacity to keep us inside an open system and a larger horizon so that the soul, the heart, and the mind do not close down inside of small and constricted space. The merely rational mind is invariably dualistic, and divides the field of almost every moment between what it can presently understand and
...more
Home is both the beginning and the end. Home is not a sentimental concept at all, but an inner compass and a North Star at the same time. It is a metaphor for the soul.
One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE
“The old wineskins are good enough” (Luke 5:39), we say, even though according to Jesus they often cannot hold the new wine.
The second half of life can hold some new wine because by then there should be some strong wineskins, some tested ways of holding our lives together. But that normally means that the container itself has to stretch, die in its present form, or even replace itself with something better.
Almost all of culture, and even most of religious history, has been invested in the creation and maintenance of first-half-of-life issues: the big three concerns of identity, security, and sexuality and gender.
Most of history has been the forging of structures of security and appropriate loyalty symbols, to announce and defend one's personal identity, one's group, and one's gender issues and identity.
In our formative years, we are so self-preoccupied that we are both overly defensive and overly offensive at the same time, with little time left for simply living, pure friendship, useless beauty, or moments of communion with nature or anything.
In a culture like ours, still preoccupied with security issues, enormously high military budgets are never seriously questioned by Congress or by the people, while appropriations reflecting later stages in the hierarchy of needs, like those for education, health care for the poor, and the arts, are quickly cut, if even considered.
Ken Keyes so wisely said, “More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.”
Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and.
There is always a wounding; and the great epiphany is that the wound becomes the secret key, even “sacred,” a wound that changes them dramatically,
The hero lives in deep time and not just in his or her own small time. In fact, I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in what many call deep time—that is, past, present, and future all at once.
Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.
People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.
Yahweh was creating a good limit situation for Adam and Eve when he told them not to eat the apple, fully knowing that they would.
Mature people invariably thank their harder parent, law-driven church, kick-ass coach, and most demanding professors—but usually years later.
You must first eat the fruit of the garden, so you know what it tastes like—and what you are missing if and when you stop eating it. We are perhaps the first generation in history, we postmodern folks, who have the freedom both to know the rules and also to critique the rules at the same time. This is changing everything and evolving consciousness at a rather quick rate.
In fact, neoconservatives are usually intense devotees of modern progress and upward mobility in the system, as we see in most Evangelicals,
Many just fall in love with their first place and position, as an extension of themselves, and spend their whole life building a white picket fence around it.
The first battles solidify the ego and create a stalwart loyal soldier; the second battles defeat the ego because God always wins.
The world mythologies all point to places like Hades, Sheol, hell, purgatory, the realm of the dead. Maybe these are not so much the alternative to heaven as the necessary path to heaven.
Most mythologies include a descent into the underworld at some point. Jesus, as we said, also “descended into hell,” and only on the third day did he “ascend into heaven.” Most of life is lived, as it were, on the “first and second days,” the threshold days when transformation is happening but we do not know it yet. In men's work we call this liminal space.
we invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question—even when it is not entirely true—over the mercy and grace of God.
Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.
Some theologians have called this divine pattern of incarnation “the scandal of the particular.” Our mind, it seems, is more pleased with universals: never-broken, always-applicable rules and patterns that allow us to predict and control things. This is good for science, but lousy for religion.
Jesus is never upset at sinners (check it out!); he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners!
Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.
failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise.
It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again—but now on a new level.
Before the truth “sets you free,” it tends to make you miserable.
Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as the price of life at all.
What passes for morality or spirituality in the vast majority of people's lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks. Some would call it conditioning or even imprinting. Without very real inner work, most folks never move beyond it.
It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do. To move beyond family-of-origin stuff, local church stuff, cultural stuff, flag-and-country stuff is a path that few of us follow positively and with integrity. The pull is just too great, and the loyal soldier fills us with appropriate guilt, shame, and self-doubt, which, as we said earlier, feels like the very voice of God.
“How much false self are you willing to shed to find your True Self?” is the lasting question.
The goal in sacred story is always to come back home, after getting the protagonist to leave home in the first place! A contradiction? A paradox? Yes, but now home has a whole new meaning, never imagined before. As always, it transcends but includes one's initial experience of home.
