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Allow yourself to be fully known, and you will know what you need to know.
New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.
You need both to go the full distance.
“Lord, show me how to make good decisions and then be willing to learn what they really ask of me.”
Isaiah says explicitly that God prefers another kind of fasting which changes our actual lifestyle and not just punishes our body. (The poor body is always the available scapegoat to avoid touching our purse, our calendar, or our prejudices.) Isaiah makes a very upfront demand for social justice, non-aggression, taking our feet off the necks of the oppressed, sharing our bread with the hungry, clothing the naked, letting go of our sense of entitlement, malicious speech, and sheltering the homeless. He says very clearly this is the real fast God wants!
It will soon become clear that Jesus is not interested in an elite who do their rituals properly yet refuse to join in the wedding feast that God is preparing for all, both insiders and outsiders.
Jesus has come to transform people, not to exclude them. He has come for the seeming losers, and not to create a country club for the supposed winners.
We can only be tempted to something that is good on some level, partially good, or good for some, or just good for us and not for others. Temptations are always about “good” things, or we could not be tempted:
Most people’s daily ethical choices are not between total good and total evil, but between various shades of good, a partial good that is wrongly perceived as an absolute good (because of the self as the central reference point), or even evil that disguises itself as good. These are what get us into trouble.
You could obey the Ten Commandments perfectly all of your life and never come close to the mark that Jesus sets for the final judgment.
Forgiveness is not some churchy technique or formula. Forgiveness is constant from God’s side, which should become a calm, joyous certainty on our side. Mercy received will be mercy passed on, and “will not return to me empty, until it has succeeded in what it was sent to do.”
Faith is much more possible in the second half of life, not necessarily chronologically but always spiritually.
“Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.”
It is not that we pray and God answers. It is that our praying is already God answering within us and through us.
Only in the more mature person can love and grace take over—or even be understood.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Oppositional energy never knows what it is for, it just knows what it is against. It is sort of a sad substitute for vision, yet negative people feed on it.
Religion which was supposed to be life and healing for the world has too often become death and boundary-keeping for the few.
Good thoughts to pray through tonight...
The connection I make between the two readings is that praying to forgive serious injuries is like praying while burning in a fiery furnace, and if you do not pray to be released from your unforgiving heart, you will indeed keep burning. Sometimes, only God can release you from such a furnace.
smug people are threatened by anyone farther along the path than they are.
Sacrifice is unconsciously an attempt to control God, who does much better without our control.
life.”Our lack of self-knowledge and our lack of wisdom make humans do very stupid and self-destructive things. Because humans cannot see their own truth very well, they do not read reality very well either.
Somewhere we must bring our shames and our denials into the light, or they kill us from within.
Spirituality is about seeing. Sin is about blindness, or as Saint Gregory of Nyssa will say, “Sin is always a refusal to grow.”
One wonders how we ever made religion into any kind of exclusionary system whatsoever when the vast majority of Jesus’ healings seem to happen to the excluded ones and maybe even the unworthy ones.
Use the word mirrored every time you read the word judgment in the Bible, and you will come much closer to the truth.)
The secret in biblical prayer is always to expect God to be true to God’s own name, identity, and patterns of goodness in the past, and not just begging God to conform to my immediate ego needs. Prayer, more than anything, seeks, creates, and preserves relationship—which is always both giving and receiving.
It seems that we have a part to play in creating a culture of life and resurrection. We must unbind one another from our fears and doubts about the last enemy, death.
On some level, we all feel we have made some kind of contract with life, when life does not come through as we had hoped, and we feel a searing pain called betrayal. It happens to all of us in different ways. It is a belly punch that leaves us with a sense of futility and emptiness.
The more love and hope you have invested in another person, the deeper the pain of betrayal is.
We will all find endless disguises and excuses to avoid letting go of what really needs to be die for our own spiritual growth.
Jesus’ body is a standing icon of what humanity is doing and what God suffers “with,” “in,” and “through” us. It is an icon of utter divine solidarity with our pain and our problems. It is both an external exposing and an eternal holding of the Great Mystery. It is our central transformative image for the soul.
Nothing changed in heaven on Good Friday, but everything potentially changed on earth. Some learned how to see and to trust the contract between God and humanity. God has always and forever loved what God created, “It was good, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). It was we who could not love and see the omnipresent goodness. We were trapped outside the veil.
Limen is the Latin word for threshold. A “liminal space” is the crucial in-between time—when everything actually happens and yet nothing appears to be happening. It is the waiting period when the cake bakes, the movement is made, the transformation takes place.
Greatness does not just happen unprepared. It must be waited for, needed, desired, and an inner space must be created. The Sabbath rest is everything—and yet nothing. Just like the soul and like the Spirit.
