One has to wonder, do we really want people to grow, or do we just want to be in control of the moment?
We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.
Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God – but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you – whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.
Setting out is always a leap of faith, a risk in the deepest sense of the term, and yet an adventure too. The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently. The new is always by definition unfamiliar and untested, so God, life, destiny, suffering have to give us a push – usually a big one – or we will not go.
If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.
And we must – absolutely must – maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.
Sacrificial religion was all exposed in Jesus’ response to any mechanical or mercenary notion of religion, but we soon went right back to it in many Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant forms, because the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control.
The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey.
Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have – right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.
So get ready for a great adventure, the one you were really born for. If we never get to our little bit of heaven, our life does not make much sense, and we have created our own “hell.” So get ready for some new freedom, some dangerous permission, some hope from nowhere, some unexpected happiness, some stumbling stones, some radical grace, and some new and pressing responsibility for yourself and for our suffering world.
Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.
Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.
We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.
If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. There is no path toward love except by practicing love. War will always produce more war. Violence can never bring about true peace.
In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over.
Failure and suffering are the great equalizers and levelers among humans. Success is just the opposite. Communities and commitment can form around suffering much more than around how wonderful or superior we are.
Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are.
Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don’t have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You’re trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.
A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.