Self-help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself.
Richard RohrTag: openness awareness teachability
Your True Self is who you are, and always have been in God . . . The great surprise and irony is that "you," or who you think you are, have nothing to do with its original creation or its demise. It's sort of disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time, isn't it? All you can do is nurture it.
Richard RohrIt is almost impossible to fall in love with majesty, power, or perfection. These make us fearful and codependent, but seldom truly loving. On some level, love can only happen between equals, and vulnerability levels the playing field. What Christians believe is that God somehow became our equal when he became the human "Jesus," a name that is, without doubt, the vulnerable name for God.
Richard RohrReligion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then we started confusing rational and provable with real. We actually regressed and went backward. In trying to defend its ground in the face of rationalism and scientism, religion tried to become "rational" itself and lost its alternative consciousness, which many of us call contemplation. It's as though we tried to deal with Mystery with the entirely wrong "software". We lost access to the higher levels of consciousness, the transrational, the transpersonal, the transcendent itself. Most tragic, we lost most inner experience of our own outer belief systems. That is the heart of religion's problem today, and it is indeed a deep and serious problem for upcoming generations. My generation took the symbols to literally, and now the following generation is just throwing them all out as useless. We are both losing. It might surprise you, but both religious fundamentalism and atheism are similar in that they are self-contained rational systems. Such a system works if you stay inside its chosen logic and territory.
Richard RohrLife is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.
Richard RohrTry to say that: “I don't know anything”. We used to call it “tabula rasa” in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, “I want to see”.
Richard RohrThe significance of Jesus’ wounded body is his deliberate and conscious holding of the pain of the world and refusing to send it elsewhere. The wounds were not necessary to convince God that we were loveable; the wounds are to convince us of the path and price of transformation. They are what will happen to you if you face and hold sin in compassion instead of projecting it in hatred.
Richard RohrLife is all about practicing for heaven." p 101.
Richard RohrTag: spirituality maturity second-half-of-life
The key to entering into the Divine Exchange is never our worthiness but always God’s graciousness. Any attempt to measure or increase our worthiness will always fall short, or it will force us into the position of denial and pretend, which produces the constant perception of hypocrisy in religious people.
To switch to an “economy of grace” is a switch that is very hard for humans to make. We base almost everything in human culture on achievement, performance, accomplishment, an equal exchange value, or some kind of worthiness gauge. I call it meritocracy. Unless one personally experiences a dramatic and personal breaking of the rules of merit (forgiveness or undeserved goodness), it is almost impossible to disbelieve or operate outside of its rigid logic. This cannot happen theoretically or abstractly. It cannot happen “out there” but must be known personally “in here.
Tag: cd
We have to let go of the passing names by which we have tried to name ourselves and become the “naked self before the naked God.” That will always feel like dying, because we are so attached to our passing names and identities. Your bare, undecorated self is already and forever the beloved child of God. When you can rest there, you will begin to share in the universal Christ consciousness, the very “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16).
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