God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.
Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.
Before Jesus, it was all about earning and meriting and performing, and Paul knew that would eat us all alive – as it has.
Human strength is defined in asserting boundaries. God, it seems, is in the business of dissolving boundaries. So we enter into paradox – what’s Three is one and what’s One is three. We just can’t resolve that, and so we confuse unity with uniformity.
It’s not the idea that we hear, as much as the positive or negative energy behind it.
As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind – just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms. But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector – of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and “mutual deference”267 – “so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself,” as Augustine daringly put it.268.
In a culture like ours, still preoccupied with security issues, enormously high military budgets are never seriously questioned by Congress or by the people, while appropriations reflecting later stages in the hierarchy of needs, like those for education, health care for the poor, and the arts, are quickly cut, if even considered. The message is clear that we are largely an adolescent culture.
God seems to have chosen to manifest the invisible in what we call the “visible,” so that all things visible are the revelation of God’s endlessly diffusive spiritual energy. Once a person recognizes that, it is hard to ever be lonely in this world again.
As I’m coming to realize more and more, God holds everything together in a mysterious quantum entanglement. With each breath we participate in the life-death-life pattern that always ends in resurrection. My hope is that each of us will choose to participate consciously, aware of this privilege and delight in being co-creators with God. Just pray that I can do whatever God wants me to do.
We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone. Alcoholics just have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.
Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.
There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive.
If people are to develop any deep spirituality today, and especially if men are to develop spiritually, they need to be liberated from self-serving worldviews.
Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is about surrendering and letting go rather than achieving and possessing. It’s more about entering the mystery than arriving at a mental certitude.
Remember this: pure literalism always leads to a decrease in meaning. Mythology and sacred texts try to lead us and allow us to have the experience for ourselves. Through our experience we discover that encounter is not only possible but desirable. So often we struggle with experiencing our experiences.
The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.
We have become human doings more than human beings, and the verb “rest,” as Jesus uses it, is largely foreign to us.
The Crucified and Risen Christ uses the mistakes of the past to create a positive future, a future of redemption instead of retribution. He does not eliminate or punish the mistakes. He uses them for transformative purposes. People formed by such love are indestructible. Forgiveness might just be the very best description of what God’s goodness engenders in humanity.
Resurrection” is another word for change, but particularly positive change – which we tend to see only in the long run. In the short run, it often just looks like death.
As Dorothy Day once wisely said, “What the Gospel forever takes away from Christians is the right to judge between the worthy and the unworthy poor.