Shadowy material resides inside each one of us, but the man who is willing to face his own capacity for darkness will discover his deepest inner goodness and the presence of the divine within him. Some men never discover the divine presence within because they can’t bring themselves to face their demons. Don’t try to engineer this process or manufacture any angels. It will be done to you; just do not hate or fear the falling.
Without elders, much of our history has been formed by juniors reacting, overreacting, and protecting their own temporary privilege, with no deep-time vision like the Iroquois Nation, which considered, “What would be good for the next seven generations?” Compare that to the present “Tea Party” movement in America.
It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!
We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.
Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past.
I am not preoccupied with collecting more goods and services; quite simply, my desire and effort – every day – is to pay back, to give back to the world a bit of what I have received.
Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity. Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with. Think about that.
The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.
The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It’s not the gathering of the saved.
Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have – right now.
The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves – by themselves – and in themselves.
We moved from wondering to answering, which has not served us well at all.
Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.
God does not decide to love, therefore, and God’s love can never be determined by the worthiness or unworthiness of the object. But God is Love itself.4 God cannot not love, because love is the nature of God’s very being.
Each one of us has to find such a relationship in the suffering that we ourselves experience, be it the loss of a job or a home, the death of someone we love, rejection by our parents or our children, the breakdown of a marriage, institutional injustice, social violence or whatever. The causes of our personal suffering are many. And when we find the living, liberating answer that gives us meaning in the midst of suffering, we realize that it is a very personal answer.
Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God, and is thus at the heart of religion. The Center is everywhere.
In fact, the best of modern theology is revealing a strong “turn toward participation,” as opposed to religion as mere observation, affirmation, moralism, or group belonging. There is nothing to join, only something to recognize, suffer, and enjoy as a participant.
Grace is just the natural loving flow of things when we allow it, instead of resisting it. Sin is any cutting or limiting of that circuit.
The Crucified One is God’s standing solidarity with the suffering, the tragedy, and the disaster of all time, and God’s promise that it will not have the final word. The Risen One is God’s final word about the universe and what God plans to do with all suffering.
In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of “winning” now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God.