In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will...
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edges of our fingertips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness
in any case
and make all things new.
~ Walter Brueggemann in AWED TO HEAVEN, ROOTED IN EARTH
Be encouraged, and offer up your simple naked being to the joyful being of God, which is both in you and yet greater than you. Hold the soft, warm compress of these loving words against your bodily self. Bypass the mind and even the affections of the heart, and forego any analysis of what you are, or are not. Simply that you are. This will be enough to launch you into the sacrament of the present moment where God is always hiding in plain sight.
~ Richard Rohr in THE NAKED NOW: LEARNING TO SEE AS THE MYSTICS SEE
Love is what we long for and were created for—in fact love is what we are as an outpouring from God—but suffering often seems to be our opening to that need, that desire, and that identity. Love and suffering are the main portals that open up the mind space and the heart space (either can come first), breaking us into breadth, and depth and communion.
If the world is a temple, then our enemies are sacred, too. The ability to respect the outsider is probably the litmus test of true seeing. It doesn't even stop with human beings and enemies of the least of the brothers and sisters. It moves to frogs and pansies and weeds. EVERYTHING becomes enchanting with true sight...All we can do is to participate.
Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, praising God until we ourselves are a constant act of praise.
Sacred space is by definition liminal space. Because we are not in control and not the center, something genuinely new can happen. Here we are capable of seeing something beyond self-interest, self-will, and security concerns. True sacred space allows alternative consciousness to emerge.
If the world is a temple, then our enemies are sacred, too. The ability to respect the outsider is probably the litmus test of true seeing. It doesn't even stop with human beings and enemies of the least of the brothers and sisters. It moves to frogs and pansies and weeds. EVERYTHING becomes enchanting with true sight.
One God, one world, one truth, one suffering, and one love. All we can do is to participate.
In authentic contemplation, we discover within ourselves the hidden living and loving Companion Presence. We need to go to the solitude and silence of the wilderness, where God calls us by name, to a deeper place. This is where we are filled with the peace that the world cannot give and which the world cannot take from us. We discover there that we have and always shall be in God. It is the spacious place of the soul. To live there is finally to be at home. God is also at home there, and when we return, we have discovered simplicity.
~ from SIMPLICITY: THE ART OF LIVING by Richard Rohr
One evening I laid my finger on my cheek and found to my surprise that it was wet. I wondered what those tears meant. What was I crying for? I wasn't consciously sad at all or consciously happy. I noticed at this moment that behind it all there was a joy, deeper than any personal joy. It was a joy in the face of the beauty of being. A joy at all the wonderful and lovable people I had already met in my life. But at the same moment, I experienced the exact opposite emotion. I hadn't known before that two such contrary feelings could coexist. Because the tears were at the same time tears of immense sadness, a sadness at what we're doing to the earth, a sadness at the people whom I have already hurt in my life, and a sadness too at my own emptiness and stupidity. I still don't know whether joy or pain had the upper hand -- both lay so close to one another.
HEARTFELT GREETINGS to you all in this month so filled with various celebrations of new life! And what hopeful signs of new birth can be seen even amidst the ignorance of our times: the walls in Europe tumbling down ... Mandala released ... Earth day's raising of consciousness ... free elections here and there. Fr. Richard Rohr in BREATHING UNDER WATER encourages us to follow the path of Jesus who is "a social critic of the illusions and games of society, while at the same time healing, loving and caring for the individual ... If I could encourage you toward one spiritual discipline it would be SILENCE and SOLITUDE."
