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by
Richard Rohr
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March 11 - October 31, 2019
Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience. From the beginning, YHWH let the Jewish people know that no right word would ever contain God’s infinite mystery.
The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere else.
When you look at any other person, a flower, a honeybee, a mountain—anything—you are seeing the incarnation of God’s love for you and the universe you call home. Pause to focus on an incarnation of God’s love apparent near you right now. You must risk it! I hope a larger understanding is dawning for you. Anything that draws you out of yourself in a positive way—for all practical purposes—is operating as God for you at that moment. How else can the journey begin? How else are you drawn forward, now not by idle beliefs but by inner aliveness? God needs something to seduce you out and beyond
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Lopez Sound Hunter Bay 25June 2019.
Presence is never self-generated, but always a gift from another, and faith is always relational at the core.
Whatever you call it, the “image of God” is absolute and unchanging. There is nothing humans can do to increase or decrease it.
But this picture was complicated when the concept of original sin entered the Christian mind.
By contrast, most of the world’s great religions start with some sense of primal goodness in their creation stories.
after Augustine, most Christian theologies shifted from the positive vision of Genesis 1 to the darker vision of Genesis 3—the so-called fall, or what I am calling the “problem.”
Jesus became a mere mop-up exercise for sin, and sin management has dominated the entire religious story line and agenda to this day. This is no exaggeration.
if you start with a problem, you tend to never get beyond that mind-set.
To begin climbing out of the hole of original sin, we must start with a positive and generous cosmic vision.
The only way, then, to increase authentic spirituality is to deliberately practice actually enjoying a positive response and a grateful heart.
unless we see dignity as being given universally, objectively, and from the beginning by God, humans will constantly think it is up to us to decide.
Have you ever deliberately befriended a person standing alone at a party? Perhaps someone who was in no way attractive
That is how the flow starts,
Love allows and accommodates everything in human experience, both the good and the bad, and nothing else can really do this.
Love and water seek not the higher place but always the lower.
Un-forgiveness lives in a repetitive past, which it cannot let go of. But forgiveness is a largeness of soul, without which there is no future or creative action—only
Forgiveness might just be the very best description of what God’s goodness engenders in humanity.
Nd forgiveness seems to have a required precondition for humans- the experience of having been forgiven ourselves
Cleaning up is a result of waking up, but most of us put the cart before the horse.
love and growth demand discernment, not enforcement.
it seems to me that most humans need a love object (which will then become a subject!) to keep themselves both sane and happy.
Parenting and family are the primary school for the love instinct, and always will be.
the genius of love is that it teaches us how to give ourselves to imperfect things too.
Love, you might say, is the training ground for adoration.
God will use anything to get you started, focused, and flowing. Only a very few actually start this journey with God as the object. And that is fully to be expected. God is not in competition with reality, but in full cooperation with it. All human loves, passions, and preoccupations can prime the pump, and only in time do most of us discover the first and final Source of those loves.
All people must learn to draw from their own Implanted Spirit, which is the only thing that will help them in the long run anyway. Jesus gives them the courage to trust their own “inner Christ”—and
people know they do not fully choose love; they fall into it, allow it, and then receive its strong charge. The evidence that you are involved in this flow will often seem two-sided. You are simultaneously losing control and finding it.
Grace is just the natural loving flow of things when we allow it, instead of resisting it. Sin is any cutting or limiting of that circuit. And we all sin now and then. But an occasional power outage can help you appreciate how much you need unearned love and deeply rely upon it. Failure is part of the deal!
God waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill the space in us, which now has grown even more spacious and receptive.
But God rewards me for letting him reward me. This is the divine two-step that we call grace: I am doing it, and yet I am not doing it; It is being done unto me, and yet by me too. Yet God always takes the lead in the dance, which we only recognize over time.
When we speak of Christ, we are speaking of an ever-growing encounter,
It is precisely this give-and-take, and knowing there will be give-and-take, that makes God so real as a Lover.
God's action within is the evidence of faith in action. This dynamic is a cinstructed consequence of our injitial self-absorption
God loves you by turning your mistakes into grace, by constantly giving you back to yourself in a larger shape.
Human loves are the trial runs. Divine love is always the goal. But it can only build on all the stepping-stones of human relationships—and then it includes them all!
The receiving of love lets us know that there was indeed a Giver. And freedom to even ask for love is the beginning of the receiving. Thus Jesus can rightly say, “If you ask, you will receive” (Matthew 7:7–8). To ask is to open the conduit from your side. Your asking is only seconding the motion. The first motion is always from God.
function of the Christ: a universally available “voice” that calls all things to become whole and true to themselves. God’s two main tools in this direction, from every appearance, seem to be great love and great suffering—and often great love that invariably leads to great suffering.
apart from love and suffering, both of which are always underserved, I see no other way that humans would recalibrate, reset, or change course.
The God Archetype is the part of you that drives you toward greater inclusivity by deep acceptance of the Real, the balancing of opposites, simple compassion toward the self, and the ability to recognize and forgive your own shadow side.
He understood that the full journey towards wholeness must always include the negative experiences (the “cross”) that we usually reject. In that, Jung was more Christian than the critics who called him anti-Christian.
indirect, subversive, and intuitive knowing,
A combination of humility and patient seeking is the best spiritual practice of all.
the supernatural is forever embedded in the natural, making the very distinction false.
This is why saints like Augustine, Teresa of Avila, and Carl Jung seem to fully equate the discovery of their own souls with the very discovery of God.
This is likely because the place from which they observed themselves grew in size from use and was eventually understood as Another consciousness. I woikd call it Christ consciousness.
when it comes, it will feel like a calm and humble ability to quietly trust yourself and trust God at the same time.
the soul’s journey invites us to infinite depth that we can never fully plumb!)
Spiritual satisfactions feed on themselves, grow by themselves, create wholeness, and are finally their own reward.
Spiritual satisfactions will often be communicated to us in material, embodied, and ecstatic forms, however. Embodiment is good and necessary,
The difference is in how we encounter these forms.
If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.
