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.
Jesus' Plan for a New World
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.
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.
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."
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.
"Thy kingdom come" means very clearly that the Kingdom is something that enters into this world, or, as Jesus puts it, "is close at hand." Don't project it into another world. It's a reality that breaks into this world now and then, when people are like God. The Kingdom is the Really Real. When the Really Real happens, when the true self emerges, you have a taste of what Jesus says it's all about. When that can happen in terms of structures or groups, when you have a free group of people who love the truth more than themselves, then you have a taste of the Kingdom descending to earth.
Jesus didn't want his community to 'have' a social ethic; he wanted it to 'be' a social ethic. Their very way of relating was to be an affront to the system of dominance and power; it was to name reality in a new way. They were to live in a new symbolic universe. This radical idea is given in a simple clue found throughout the New Testament: Jesus' presence with others at table.
Our ordinary lives are given an extraordinary significance when we accept that our lives are about something much larger, our pain is a participation in the redemptive suffering of God, our creativity is the very passion of God for the world. No longer do we need to self-validate, self-congratulate or self-doubt--our place in the cosmos is assured. I do not need to be the whole play or even understand the full script. It is enough to know that I have been chosen to be one actor on the stage. I need only play my part as well as I can.
The desert is where you go apart from the world order as it is. It's where you simply stop being trapped in the world's addictive patterns. If you are addicted to the world's or your own patterns, you really need to go apart; otherwise you'll never stop sleepwalking.... What Jesus is talking about, first and foremost, is how do you enter into the real Now. Jesus gives us "real eyes" to "realize" where the "Real lies."