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.
Richard Rohr
"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.
Finding one's soul is always leaving one's comfort zone, letting go and going to a bigger place.... Jesus creates the ecclesia, literally, "the called-out ones." The Church should be that group of people who have moved to a place of freedom and are willing to ask the big questions of the extended family, not only the questions of the natural family.... Jesus broadens our vision. "Family values" is sometimes a cover for a very self-protective and narrow agenda.... Jesus requires his first disciples to call into question even their "family values."
Conversion, the movement toward the Lord, is a process of disenchantment with the ego, recognizing how truly afraid and poor it is. The only way people can ever be freed from their fears is to be freed from themselves. There is almost a complete correlation between the amount of fear in our lives and the amount of attachment we have to ourselves. The person who is beyond fear has given up the need to control or possess. That one says, I am who I am in God's eyes--nothing more, nothing less. I don't need to impress you because I am who I am, and not who you think I am--or who I think I am.
That's what the Pauline theology of Baptism is saying: You have died (Romans 6:3-5). In Christ you don't need the false self. You have faced the enemy once and for all and, guess what? It's you!
It might be a little cynical, but you could almost figure out what Jesus said by looking at our history and naming the opposite of what we did! We keep worshiping the messenger, keeping Jesus up on statues and images, so we can avoid what Jesus said. It's the best smokescreen in the world. We just keep saying, "We love Jesus." The more we talk about Jesus, the less we'll do what he said. That's the way the ego fools itself. And in this case, it's the way culture, nations and even the churches have fooled themselves.
The gospel is not primarily a set of facts but a way of seeing and a way of being in the world because of God. Jesus speaks to the heart, saying (1) God is on your side; (2) God can be trusted; (3) the universe is safe and benevolent; (4) trust yourselves, one another and God; (5) there is no reason to be afraid; (6) it's all heading toward something good.