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.
Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life. Odysseus has lived the journeys of both halves of life, and is ready to freely and finally let go.
By the age of seven, almost all of us have separated our body and our soul from our mind, and we give all of our credence to our mind, disconnected from our bodies, disconnected from our souls, which abide and grow more in silence. Descartes.
Remember, the opposite of rational is not always irrational, but it can also be transrational or bigger than the rational mind can process; things like love, death, suffering, God, and infinity are transrational experiences. Both myth and mature religion understand this.
Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.
In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan and find it insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.
The healthy do not need a doctor, but sick people do. I have not come to coddle the comfortable, but to set trapped people free for a new life.” Luke 5:31–32.
Given our present evolution of consciousness, and especially the historical and technological access we now have to the “whole picture,” I now wonder if a sincere person can even have a healthy and holy “personal” relationship with God if that God does not also connect them to the universal. A personal God cannot mean a smaller God, nor can God make you in any way smaller – or such would not be God.
If religion cannot find a meaning for human suffering, humanity is in major trouble. All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. If.
God can most easily be lost by being thought found.
Christians affirm the communion of saints in the Nicene Creed, but I think there should be an equal belief in the “communion of sinners.
Contemplation is the “second gaze,” through which you see something in its particularity and yet also in a much larger frame.