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by
Richard Rohr
Read between
July 22 - July 25, 2019
I find that many, if not most, people and institutions remain stymied in the preoccupations of the first half of life. By that I mean that most
people's concerns remain those of establishing their personal (or superior) identity, creating various boundary markers for themselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking to what seem like significant people or projects.
But, in my opinion, this first-half-of-life task is no more than finding the starting gate. It is merely the warm-up act, not the full journey.
“necessary suffering,”
All spiritual language is by necessity metaphor and symbol. The Light comes from elsewhere, yet it is necessarily reflected through those of us still walking on the journey ourselves.
“We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!”
We are the clumsy stewards of our own souls. We are charged to awaken, and much of the work of spirituality is learning how to stay out of the way of this rather natural growing and awakening.
All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given—which is ourselves!
There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and enjoy as a participant. You are already in the eternal flow
The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.
No wise person ever wanted to be younger. —NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM
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.
Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.
bottom. 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.
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.
The loss and renewal pattern is so constant and ubiquitous that it should hardly be called a secret at all. Yet it is still a secret, probably because we do not want to see it.
Scott Peck's
The Road Less Traveled.
He told me personally once that he felt most Western people were just spiritually lazy. And when we are lazy, we stay on the path we are already on, even if it is going nowhere. It is the spiritual equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: everything winds down unless some outside force winds it back up. True spiritua...
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It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you!
Jesus also tells us that there are two groups who are very good at trying to deny or avoid this humiliating surprise: those who are very “rich” and those who are very “religious.” These two groups have very different plans for themselves, as they try to totally steer their own ships with well-chosen itineraries. They follow two different ways of going “up” and avoiding all “down.”
“The children of this world are wiser in their ways than the children of light” (Luke 16:8).
We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.
Christians. 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.
those who have gone “down” are the only ones who understand “up.” Those who have somehow fallen, and fallen well, are the only ones who can go up and not misuse “up.”
It's no surprise at all that in English (and I am told in other languages as well) we speak of “falling” in love. I think it is the only way to get there. None would go freely, if we knew ahead of time what love is going to ask of us.
The language of the first half of life and the language of the second half of life are almost two different vocabularies, known only to those who have been in both of them.
The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before.
In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never t...
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understands myths, and their importance, although almost all historic cultures did.
Myths are true basically because they work! A sacred myth keeps a people healthy, happy, and whole—even inside their pain. They give deep meaning, and pull us into “deep time”
God did not need to wait until we organized human spiritual intuitions into formal religions.
the whole story is set in the matrix of seeking to find home and then to return there, and thus refining and defining what home really is.
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.
No Pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do your journey for you.
Maybe it is what humanity needed to get started. “Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost said, but he also presumed that you don't just build fences. You eventually need to cross beyond them too, to actually meet the neighbor.
The very fact
that so many religious people have to so vigorously prove and defend their salvation theories makes one seriously doubt whether they have experienced divine mirroring at any great depth.
Thus the most common one-liner in the Bible is “Do not be afraid”; in fact, someone counted and found that it occurs 365 times!
As Jesus said, “Why do you ask, what am I to eat? What am I to wear?” And to that he says, “Is life not so much more than food? Is life not so much more than clothing?” (Luke 12:23). “What will it profit you if you gain the whole world, and lose your very soul?” (Matthew 16:26).
Ken Keyes so wisely said, “More suffering comes into the world by people taking
offense than by people intending to give offense.”
The offended ones feel the need to offend back those who they think have offended them, creating defensiveness on the part of the presumed offenders, which often becomes a new offensive—ad infinitum. There seems to be no way out of this self-defeating and violent Ping-Pong game—exc...
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Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature. You can fill in the names here with your own political disaster story. But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid,
The “adepts” in all religions are always forgiving, compassionate, and radically inclusive. They do not create enemies, and they move beyond the boundaries of their own “starter group” while still honoring them and making use of them. Jesus the Jew criticizes his own religion the most, yet never leaves it!
Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and. (Think Gandhi, Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and the like.) These enlightened people tend to grease the wheels of religious evolution.
If there is no wise authority capable of protecting them and validating them, most prophetic or wise people and all “early adopters” are almost always “torn to pieces.” Their wisdom sounds like dangerous foolishness, like most of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount to Christians, like Gandhi to Great Britain, like Martin Luther King Jr. to white America, like Nelson Mandela to Dutch Reformed South Africa, like Harriet Tubman to the Daughters of the American Revolution, like American nuns to the Catholic patriarchy.
As a preacher, I find that I am forced to dumb down the material in order to interest a Sunday crowd that does not expect or even want any real challenge; nor does it exhibit much spiritual or intellectual curiosity. “Just repeat what I expect to hear, Father, and maybe a joke or two!”
As a spiritual director, I find that most people facing the important transformative issues of social injustice, divorce, failure, gender identity, an inner life of prayer, or any radical reading of the Gospel are usually bored and limited by the typical Sunday church agenda.
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.
