To know the Lord and his ways,” as the Jewish prophets put it,250 has very little to do with intelligence and very much to do with a wonderful mixture of confidence and surrender. People who live in this way tend to be the calmest and happiest people I know. They draw their life from the inside out.
The game is over once we see clearly because evil succeeds only by disguising itself as good, necessary, or helpful.
You rest in God, not in outcomes.
It is the things that you cannot do anything about and the things that you cannot do anything with that do something with you.
It seems we are not that free to be honest, or even aware, because most of our garbage is buried in the unconscious. So it is absolutely essential that we find a spirituality that reaches to that hidden level. If not, nothing really changes.
Amazing that we made Jesus into the consummate answer giver because that is not what he usually does. He more often leads us right onto the horns of our own human-made dilemmas, where we are forced to meet God and be honest with ourselves. He creates problems for us more than resolves them, problems that very often cannot be resolved by all-or-nothing thinking but only by love and forgiveness.
Love grounds us by creating focus, direction, motivation, even joy – and if we don’t find these things in love, we usually will try to find them in hate.
Francis’s all-night prayer, “Who are you, O God, and who am I?” is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.
No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.
All people must learn to draw from their own Implanted Spirit, which is the only thing that will help them in the long run anyway. Jesus gives them the courage to trust their own “inner Christ” – and not just its outer manifestation in himself.
As any good therapist will tell you, you cannot heal what you do not acknowledge, and what you do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control of you from within, festering and destroying you and those around you.
Think of the cold Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, or the monk who tries to eliminate all humor in The Name of the Rose, or the frowning Koran burners of Florida. Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.
Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but is also the very shape of human happiness.
Jesus never said, “Worship me,” but he often said, “Follow me.” We have wasted a lot of good energy on “vicarious substitutionary atonement theories” and created a punitive and petty God in the process – a “Father God” who was incapable of forgiving “without blood.”6 Is God that unfree? Remember, the ego likes contests of win and lose and cannot even comprehend anything like win-win. Jesus became our substitute in losing, hoping it would let us off the hook, I guess.
Our starting place was always original goodness,10 not original sin. This.
We’ve turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality.
All Mature Spirituality Is About Letting Go.
The trouble is that we have made the Bible into a bunch of ideas – about which we can be right or wrong – rather than an invitation to a new set of eyes. Even worse, many of those ideas are the same, old tired ones, mirroring the reward and punishment system of the dominant culture, so that most people don’t even expect anything good or anything new from the momentous revelation that we call the Bible. The.
Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.
It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again – but now on a new level.