Richard Rohr, adapted from Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, pp. 17-19.
How do we find what is supposedly already there? How do we awaken our deepest and most profound selves? By praying and meditating? By more silence, solitude, and sacraments? Yes to all of the above, but the most important way is to live and fully accept our reality. This solution sounds so simple and innocuous that most of us fabricate all kinds of religious trappings to avoid taking up our own inglorious, mundane, and ever-present cross.
Living and accepting our own reality will not feel very spiritual. It will feel like we are on the edges rather than dealing with the essence. Thus most run toward more esoteric and dramatic postures instead of bearing the mystery of God’s suffering and joy inside themselves. But the edges of our lives—fully experienced, suffered, and enjoyed—lead us back to the center and the essence.
2 comments:
The messy part of life. How I would like sometimes to chop it off. It doesn’t seem like God could possibly want that from me. But yes, that is exactly what God does want, for me to find a way not only to bear but even enjoy all of it, in all its horrible messy confusing aliveness. Then I discover that the part of me that seems most horrifying is actually the most alive of all, the part without which I could not be me.
"the mystery of God’s suffering and joy inside" Indeed it is mysterious to me that God suffers, yet why do i find it easier to believe that God experiences always joy? Spiritually I want more than anything to walk with God/ess, to emulate Her and embrace all that S/he is. Truthfully, though, I do not want to suffer. I want only joy. How naive and immature. May I mature into God's mystery gracefully.
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