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Francis had found his one firm spot on which to stand and from which he could move his world. He did this in at least three clear ways. First, he walked into the prayer-depths of his own tradition, as opposed to mere religious repetition of old formulas. Second, he sought direction in the mirror of creation itself, as opposed to mental and fabricated ideas or ideals. Third, and most radically, he looked to the underside of his society, to the community of those who had suffered, for an understanding of how God transforms us.
His chosen lens was what he called “poverty” and, of course, he was only imitating Jesus.
Belief hinged on what could be proven by a certain paradigm called science. Science assumed—and this became the arrogance of the modern mind—that it knew more than anybody else ever had. It did not yet realize that this new knowing was limited to small areas. In its newfound excitement, such knowing quickly neglected other areas. Analysis of parts became more important than a synthesis of the whole.
philosophy of progress,
postmodernism —a critique of modernism’s false optimism and trust in progress.
We end up with a being who is both godlike (“I know”) and utterly cynical (“I have to create my own truth because there are no universal patterns”).
Another aspect of the postmodern mind is what we call a “market” mentality. In a market-driven culture like ours, things no longer have inherent value, but only exchange value.
Once we lose a sense of inherent value, we have lost all hope of encountering true value, much less the Holy.
Prometheus passes for Jesus.
The final state of a nihilistic worldview is a collapse into vulgarity and shock as the primary values.
As long as we keep trying to deal with the mystery of evil in some way other than forgiveness and healing, we will continue to create negative ideologies like fundamentalism and nihilism in all their endless forms.
there is little in the biblical revelation that ever promised us an ordered universe. The whole Bible is about meeting God in the actual, in the incarnate moment, in the scandal of particularity, and not in educated theories—
The price we pay for our dualistic mind is that one side of the comparison is always idealized and the other demonized,
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
Life does not have to be fixed, controlled, or even understood for us to be happy.
spirituality, in its best sense, is about what we do with our pain.
It is a general rule that when we don’t transform our pain we will always transmit it.
Nïveté
Law without Gospel actually paralyzes and condemns us to failure.
to be a good leader of anything today—
we have to be able to contain, to hold patiently, a certain degree of anxiety.
People more easily define themselves by what they are against, by who they hate, by who else is wrong, instead of by what they believe in and whom they love.
Education is not the same as transformation.
All Jesus does is breathe forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not apparently something God does; it is who God is.
Faith, however, allows us to hold the tension until we can recognize the true evil—of which we are a part.
Guilt, I am told, is about things we have done or not done, but our shame is about the primal emptiness of our very being—not what we have done, but who we are and who we are not. Guilt is a moral question. Shame—foundational shame, at least—is an ontological question. It is not resolved by changing behavior as much as by changing our very self-image, our alignment with the universe. Shame is not about what we do, but where we abide.
The difference between guilt and shame
Jesus receives our hatred and does not return it. He suffers and does not make the other suffer.
Jesus destroys the death that is eating us all alive, that is eating up our hearts. This death is our endless attempt to justify why we have a right to our hurt and to our hatred.
The cross is finally about how to stand against hate without becoming hate ourselves.
The human capacity to hate and kill is the sin of the world and it took a Lamb (see John 1:29) to dismantle what the lions of history could only perpetuate.
The cross is saying that there is a cruciform pattern to reality.
Reality is not meaningless and absurd (chaos/no patterns/nihilism), but neither is it perfect consistency (rationalism/scientism/fundamentalism). Reality, rather, is filled with contradictions.
People say they do not want to give way on important moral issues, but far too often they don’t want to give way on the ego’s need to be right, superior, and in control.
The mind can only take pictures using the film with which it’s been loaded. Our
Metanoia
When we take an extreme position, we take part of the responsibility for pushing people to the opposite extreme.
In hostile situations, we find that Jesus either kept silent, reframed the question, or put a question back to the speaker.
If we spend all day controlling and blocking others, why would we change when we kneel to pray?
we cannot think ourselves into a new way of living; we must live ourselves into a new way of thinking.
When we lose the reflection of the divine image in all things, we quickly disintegrate.
Deconstruction is only the first stage toward a new reconstruction. The biblical prophets would have called it “the toppling of idols,” which rightly precedes the entrance into the temple of the true sacred.
Normally, the way God pushes us is by disillusioning us with the present mode.
Faith allows us to trust that God is in the suffering and the trials: “I thank you, Jesus, for what you want to teach me in this.”
Whatever reconstruction we’re going to do cannot be based on fear or on reaction—even reaction against junk religion. It has to be based on a positive and fully human experience of God as a loving Presence.
“God comes disguised as your life.”
Is the interrobang supposed to be ironic?
The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But transformation, the mystery we’re examining, more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart.
When we give ourselves to the mystery of Christ, we give ourselves to being hurt, to being on the wheel of life, to walking what we call the Way of the Cross. No
If you attack something directly, you let it determine the energy, the style, the opposition.
