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Redemptive suffering instead of redemptive violence is the Jesus way.
False expectations create resentful people, like Sisyphus, rolling the stone up the hill and knowing it will roll back down. Grateful people emerge in a world rightly defined, where even the shadows are no surprise, but, in fact, opportunity.
Maybe we avoid shadows because they are an in-depth experience of our own powerlessness and poverty.
First, like Ezekiel the prophet, we must eat the scroll that is “lamentation, wailing, and moaning” in our belly, and only eventually sweet as honey (see Ezekiel 2:9–3:3).
“the dark night.”
All transformation takes place in such liminal space.
Salvation is, most commonly, sin overcome in the biblical tradition, not just sin avoided.
freeze.ormally,
Restlessness
staying with the paradox, the eustress, refusing to compartmentalize the good and the bad, might be the most courageous thing we have ever done.
What it comes down to, so often, is the power of simple love to lead us out of meaninglessness. It sounds so naïve and so simplistic, but love is still the greatest healer, the great transformer, and the greatest giver of meaning. Love aligns us.
When we’re at the point of absolute doubt, then we—hopefully—look for new meanings
It is only good to pass through times of doubt, not to stay there.
Faith gets purified every time we go through the cycle of doubt and failure,
On this wheel of fortune, just about everything is purified: self-image, God-image, worldview.
As Saint John of the Cross described, our gods must each die until we find the true God. As Meister Eckhart put it, “I pray God to rid me of God.”
“a hopeful stance”
How does one know the difference between opening possibility and increasing negative energy?
Maybe spaciousness is a good definition of compassion. It is certainly a good description of a third way.
Exile/prison
the right and left hands of God
When we recognize that we are an accomplice in the evil and also complicit in the good, and take responsibility for both, when we can use the language of “us” and not “them,” then we are bearing the full mystery of something. Then our criticism is coming from love, not hate.
In general, the only people I really trust to do reconstruction work are people who have paid their dues to deconstruction. If someone has never been able to see the shadow side, they haven’t gained the right to talk the language of reconstruction.
We need to have pulled away from the idolatry of the system in order to gain the authority and the credibility to walk back in and work for reconstruction.
We can’t just point out the shadow side.
Well, he is okay as long as HE is the critic, not the criticized.
The shadowlands are sacred ground. Our trust is that the God who has called us into this present moment will also sustain us and lead us through it.
While material goods decrease as we make use of them, spiritual goods increase as we use them.
In spirituality, there are basically two paths: the path of the fall and the path of the return.
How can we know the light if we’ve never named the shadows?
We recognize the clear need for prophetic deconstruction of all idolatries that make the worship of God impossible.
Jesus is the clearest image of the unseen God. In him, all things cohere, all opposites are overcome. He is the head of the living body in whom all things are reconciled and overcome.
