God loves us so perfectly he lets us be the heroes. God lets us wrestle with the angel of Yahweh, lets us struggle with God and win. When we try to let go and give our life to God, God gives it back to us. Should we be surprised? That's what love does. That's the only thing you can get excited about when you're in love--giving your life to the other and seeing enjoyment in the other. That's the union toward which God is calling us. The lover delighting in the beloved and the beloved delighting in the lover.
Richard Rohr
Have you been loved well by someone? So well that you are secure that person will receive you and will forgive your worst fault? That's the kind of security the soul receives from God. When the soul lives in that kind of security, it is no longer occupied with technique. We don't condemn people who don't do it our way. All techniques, spiritual disciplines are just fingers pointing to the moon. But the moon is the important thing, not the pointing fingers.
In God's reign, everything belongs. Even the broken and poor parts; the imperial systems of culture, however, demand 'in' people and 'out' people, victors and victims. Until we have utterly faced this battle in our own soul, we will usually perpetrate it in the outer world of politics and class. Dualistic thinking begins in the soul and moves to the mind and eventually moves to the street. True prayer nips the lie in the bud. It is usually experienced as tears, surrender or forgiveness.
There are two major tasks in the human spiritual journey. The task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one's life and answer some central questions: "Who am I?" "What makes me signficiant?" "How can I support myself?" "Who will go with me?"
The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver. in other words, the container is for the sake of the contents. Problematically, the first task invests so much of ourselves that we often cannot imagine there is a second task, or that anything more could be expected of us.
Let go of the private dream for the dream of God. Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here. It's the hardest place for us to live, the place where we're most afraid to live, because it feels so empty and boring. Now-here almost always feels like nowhere, and that's precisely where we must go.
"It comes like a gentle dew" (Isaiah 45:8). Grace comes when you stop being preoccupied and stop thinking that by your own meddling, managing and manufacturing you can create it.
We're trained to be managers, to organize life, to make things happen. That's what's built our culture, and it's not all bad. But if you transfer that to the spiritual life, it's pure heresy. It doesn't work. You can't manage and maneuver and manipulate spiritual energy. It's a matter of letting go. It's a matter of getting the self out of the way, and becoming smaller, as John the Baptist said. It's a matter of the great kenosis, as Paul talks about in Philippians 2:6-11, the emptying of the self so that there's room for another.
It's very hard for us not to fix and manage life and to wait upon it, "like a gentle dew."
There are always two worlds. The world as it operates is power; the world as it should be is love. The secret of Kingdom life is how can you live in both--simultaneously. The world as it is will always be built on power, ego and success. Yet we also must keep our eyes intently on the world as it should be--what Jesus calls the Reign of God. Power apart from love leads to brutality; but love that does not engage with power is mere sentimentality.
Sin and grace are related. In a certain sense the only way we really understand salvation, grace, and freedom, is by understanding their opposites. That's why the great saints are, invariably, converted sinners.
When you finally have to eat and taste your own hard-heartedness, your own emptiness, selfishness and all the rest, then you open up to grace. That is the pattern in all our lives. That's why it was such a grace in my hermitage year when I was able, at last--even as a male and a German--to weep over my sins and to feel tremendous sadness at my own silliness and stupidity.
I think all of us have to confront ourselves as poor people in that way. And that's why many of our greatest moments of grace follow upon, sometimes, our greatest sins. We are hard-hearted and closed-minded for years, then comes the moment of vulnerability and mercy. We break down and break through.
Jesus truly was dangerous. He was creating a following with a kind of thinking that was much more on the side of inclusiveness than exclusiveness.... Jesus is always moving the boundaries out while still respecting the center. That's the key to wisdom: being grounded in the center and still, from that deep foundation, knowing how to move out.
Our original freedom was the freedom to be our True Self--the freedom to live in the whole truth of the moment--attractive and unattractive. This takes far more courage than we might imagine. Great religions offer us, not just freedom from our small illusion (often called "sin") but freedom for the Big Picture. That's why the saints could be imprisoned and not lose their spirit. They could be put down and persecuted like Jesus and still not lose their joy, their heart, or their perspective. Their freedom came from within. Our freedom 'from' finally and eventually becomes our freedom 'for.' We must always seek the positive and full meaning of freedom, which nation-states know little about. Secular freedom is having to do what we want to do. Religious freedom is wanting to do what we have to do.