God oft-times doesn’t give a lot of answers but just keeps telling us who we are. God just keeps inviting us into that place where love is alive and where God is in love.
Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God.
As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name.
You will have many more Aarons building you golden calves than Moseses leading you on any exodus.
You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing or confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity.
Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.
Love is always stronger than death, and unto that love you have now returned.
The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it “Always Advent,” but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all.
If your prayer is not enticing you outside your comfort zones, if your Christ is not an occasional “threat,” you probably need to do some growing up and learning to love.
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.