When John says, 'Leave the world,' he does not mean the world with its desperate needs that cry out to be served. He means the self-centered projects, programs, demands--rationalized, justified and even glorified--of security, pleasure, esteem and power, which hinder our growing up into full human personhood.
Thomas Keating
To be in the kingdom is to participate in God's solidarity with the poor by sharing with them the good things.... In the New Testament the great sin is to be deaf to the cry of the poor whether that cry springs from emotional, material, or spiritual need. Although we cannot help but partake in some degree in social injustice because we live in this world, we must constantly reach out in concrete and practical ways to those in need. Divine love is not a feeling, but a choice. It is to show mercy.
If we say yes to the invitation to repent, we may experience enormous freedom for a few months or for even a year or two. Our former way of life, in some degree, is cleaned up and certain relationships healed. Then, after a year or two, the dust stirred up by our first conversion settles and the old temptations recur.
As the springtime of the spiritual journey turns to summer--and fall and winter--the orginal enthusiasms begin to wane. At some point, we have to face the fundamental problem, which is the unconscious motivation that is still in place, even after we have chosen the values of the gospel....
Now we experience the full force of the spiritual combat, the struggle with what we want to do and feel we should do, and our incredible inability to carry it out.... Such insight is the beginning of the real spiritual journey.
The innate tendency to hang on, to possess, is the biggest obstacle to union with God. The reason we are possessive is that we feel separated from God. The feeling of separation is our ordinary psychological experience of the human condition. This misapprehension is the cause of our efforts to look for happiness down every path that we can possibly envision, when actually it is right under our noses. We just don't know how to perceive it.
The process of conversion begins with genuine openness to change--to be open to the possibility that just as natural life evolves, so our spiritual life is evolving.... Each time you consent to an enhancement of faith, your world changes and all your relationship have to be adjusted to the new perspective and the new light that has been given you. Our relationship to ourselves, to Jesus Christ, to our neighbor, to the Church--to God--all change. It is the end of the world we have previously known and lived in.
Sacrifice is absolutely essential for human growth; yet the abiding disposition of sacrifice is rarely established without some experience of suffering. Of course suffering itself does not make one holy and can even lead to despair. Despair is suffering that fails to teach.
We are made for happiness and there is nothing wrong in reaching out for it. Unfortunately, most of us are so deprived of happiness that as soon as it comes along, we reach out for it with all our strength and try to hang on to it for dear life. That is the mistake. The best way to receive it is to give it away. If you give everything back to God, you will always be empty, and when you are empty, there is more room for God.
Our spiritual journey does not start with a clean slate. We carry with us a prepackaged set of values and preconceived ideas which, unless confronted and redirected, will soon scuttle our journey, or else turn it into pharisaism, the occupational hazard of religious and spiritual people.
The developmental character of human life has become much better known in the last hundred years, and it has enormous implications for the spiritual journey. Our personal histories are computerized, so to speak, in the biocomputers of our brains and nervous systems. Our memory banks have on file everything that occurred from the womb to the present, especially memories with strong emotional charges....
We may not remember the events of early childhood, but the emotions do. When events occur later in life that resemble those once felt to be harmful, dangerous, or rejecting, the same feelings surface.... The human heart is designed for unlimited happiness--for limitless truth and for limitless love--and nothing less can satisfy. We travel down various roads that promise happiness but can't provide it because they are only partial goods. Since the emotional programs from early childhood are already in place, our search for happiness in aduluts life tends to be programmed by childish expectations that cannot possibly be realized....
We come now to the heart of the problem of the human condition. Jesus addressed this problem head-on in the gospel. What was his first word when beginning his ministry? "Repent." To repent is not to take on afflictive penances like fasting, vigils, flagellation or whatever else appeals. It means to change the direction in which you are looking for happiness.
God wants to share with us even in this life the maximum amount of divine life that we can possibly contain. The call of the gospel, 'Follow me,' is addressed to every baptized person.... The attempt to do this--to reach more deeply toward the love of Christ within us and to manifest it more fully in the world--constitutes the heart of the spiritual journey.
In religious circles there is a cliche that describes the divine purification as 'a battering from without and boring from within.' God goes after our accumulated junk with something equivalent to a compressor and starts digging through our defense mechanisms, revealing the secret corners that hide the unacceptable parts of ourselves.
We may think it is the end of our relationship with God. Actually, it is an invitation to a new depth of relationship with God. A lot of emptying and healing has to take place if we are to be resopnsive to the sublime communications of God. The full transmission of divine life cannot come through and be fully heard if the static of the false self is too loud.