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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Richard Rohr
Read between
July 15 - August 17, 2019
The greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown. —CARL JUNG
First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God! —LADY JULIAN OF NORWICH
this finished product is more valuable to God than it seemingly is to us.
True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it.
Holding our inner blueprint, which is a good description of our soul, and returning it humbly to the world and to God by love and service is indeed of ultimate concern.
The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.
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.
We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully.
what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.
What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.
Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.
The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.
Someone has to make clear to us that homes are not meant to be lived in—but only to be moved out from.
Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our actual “sacred dance.”
the way up is the way down.
The down-up pattern is constant, too, in mythology, in stories like that of Persephone, who must descend into the underworld and marry Hades for spring to be reborn.
sacrifice of something to achieve something else is almost the only pattern.
The loss and renewal pattern is so constant and ubiquitous that it should hardly be called a secret at all.
Scott Peck's major insight in his best-selling book, The Road Less Traveled.
We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.
If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it!
the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good.
Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept, goodness is a beautiful human concept that includes us all.
First-half-of-life religion is almost always about various types of purity codes or “thou shalt nots” to keep us up, clear, clean, and together, like good Boy and Girl Scouts.
Because none of us desire a downward path to growth through imperfection, seek it, or even suspect it, we have to get the message with the authority of a “divine revelation.”
So Jesus makes it into a central axiom: the “last” really do have a head start in moving toward “first,” and those who spend too much time trying to be “first” will never get there.
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.
normally we need a few good successes to give us some ego structure and self-confidence, and to get us going. God mercifully hides thoughts of dying from the young, but unfortunately we then hide it from ourselves till the later years finally force it into our consciousness.
“It is when I am weak that I am strong”
Many have opted for the soft religion of easy ego consolations, the human growth model, or the “prosperity Gospel” that has become so common in Western Christianity and in all the worlds we spiritually colonize.
This is probably why Jesus praised faith and trust even more than love.
Faith alone holds you while you stand waiting and hoping and trusting.
we speak of “falling” in love. I think it is the only way to get there.
great love is always a discovery, a revelation, a wonderful surprise, a falling into “something” much bigger and deeper that is literally beyond us and larger than us.
People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels. I have often thought that this is the symbolic meaning of Moses breaking the first tablets of the law, only to go back up the mountain and have them redone (Exodus 32:19–34, 35) by Yahweh.
The Dalai Lama said much the same thing: “Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly.”
For some reason, religious people tend to confuse the means with the actual goal.
In the beginning, you tend to think that God really cares about your exact posture, the exact day of the week for public prayer, the authorship and wordings of your prayers, and other such things.
Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional pr...
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Western rationalism no longer understands myths, and their importance, although almost all historic cultures did.2 We are the obvious exception, and have replaced these effective and healing story lines with ineffective, cruel, and disorienting narratives like communism, fascism, terrorism, mass production, and its counterpart, consumerism.
They hold life and death, the explainable and the unexplainable together as one; they hold together the paradoxes that the rational mind cannot process by itself.
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.
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.
We also need to feel “special”; we need our “narcissistic fix.” By that I mean, we all need some successes, response, and positive feedback early in life, or we will spend the rest of our lives demanding it, or bemoaning its lack, from others.
You have to first have an ego structure to then let go of it and move beyond it.
If we do not move beyond our early motivations of personal security, reproduction, and survival (the fear-based preoccupations of the “lizard brain”), we will never proceed beyond the lower stages of human or spiritual development.
Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.
“More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.”
There seems to be no way out of this self-defeating and violent Ping-Pong game—except growing up spiritually.
