Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it “conversion” or “repentance.
Try to say that: “I don’t know anything”. We used to call it “tabula rasa” in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don’t need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner’s mind. We need to say with the blind man, “I want to see”.
In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us.
Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives.
I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true.
God for us, God alongside us, God within us.
We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.
In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward – and by ourselves. It works for so few, and it cannot serve us well in the long run – because it is not true. It is an inherently win-lose game, and more and more people find themselves on the losing side.
God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.
One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate.
Our starting place was always original goodness,10 not original sin. This makes our ending place – and everything in between – possessing an inherent capacity for goodness, truth, and beauty.
The energy in the universe is not in the planets, or in the protons or neutrons, but in the relationship between them.
Remember, mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand – it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, “I’ve got it.” Always and forever, mystery gets you!
I have often wondered why people never want to put a stone monument of the Eight Beatitudes on a courthouse lawn. Then I realize that the Eight Beatitudes of Jesus would probably not be very good for any war, any macho worldview, the wealthy, or our consumer economy.
Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.
In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good.
Only hour by hour gratitude is strong enough to overcome all temptations to resentment.
Love flows unstoppably downward, around every obstacle – like water. Love and water seek not the higher place but always the lower. That’s why forgiveness is often the most powerful display of love in action.
Invariably when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed. So watch for any overreactions or overdenials.
Love is not something you do; love is someone you are. It is your True Self.8 Love is where you came from and love is where you’re going. It’s not something you can buy. It’s not something you can attain. It is the presence of God within you, called the Holy Spirit – or what some theologians name uncreated grace.