But which should come first, grace or responsibility? The answer is that both come first. All we can do is get out of the way and then the soul takes its natural course.
Without some deconstruction, everything becomes idolatrous. The prophets were religious deconstructionists.
Remember, anthropologically, religion begins with the making of a distinction between the pure and the impure. Jesus consistently ignores such a distinction. In fact, it is at the heart of almost half of his gospel actions!
Each generation has to appropriate its deepest beliefs for itself. We used to say it this way: “God has no grandchildren.” Each generation must itself be realigned with God and discover the mystery for itself.
It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.
The God-image, the self-image, and the world-image are deeply connected. Normally, when one of them changes, the other two have to readjust. So, when our God-image changes, then we have to change. When our world-image is adjusted, we are confused or even depressed for a while.
The spiritual life is always about letting go of unnecessary baggage so that we’re prepared for death’s final letting go.
Hate can be helpful to certain causes. It unites a group quickly, it gives a person identity – even if it is a negative one – and, most of all, it takes away doubt and all free-floating anxiety. It gives us a place to stand that feels superior and in control. Hate settles the dust and ambiguity that none of us like. Hate is much more common, and more immediately effective, than love. Hate, as we will sadly see below, makes the world go ’round.
For five hundred years, Christian teachers defined and redefined salvation almost entirely in individualistic terms, while well-disguised social evils – greed, pride, ambition, deceit, gluttony – moved to the highest levels of power and influence, even in our churches.
You are in a position of total powerlessness, and your ego is fighting it. All you can do is surrender and enter into this dance of unhindered dialogue, this circle of praise, this web of communion that we call the Blessed Trinity.
Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for “false evidence appearing real.
Even inside an incarnational worldview, we grow by passing beyond some perfect order, through a usually painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to an enlightened reorder or “resurrection.” This is the “pattern that connects” and solidifies our relationship with everything around us.
We’re living in a time when the far right and the far left in almost every institution are using the eccentricities and evils of the other end to justify their own extremes.
Christianity, for some, is neither faith nor reason – just reactive tribalism hiding behind the skirts of Mother Church.
Know that things are okay as they are. This moment is as perfect as it can be. The saints called this the “sacrament of the present moment.
Ken Keyes so wisely said, “More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.
My starting point is that we’re already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is.
The two alternatives are always exclusionary, usually in an angry way: things are either totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me, male or female, Democrat or Republican, Christian or pagan, on and on and on. The binary mind provides quick security and false comfort, but never wisdom. It thinks it is smart because it counters your idea with an opposing idea. There is usually not much room for a “reconciling third.” I see this in myself almost every day.
We become what we are willing to see.
To take the Scriptures seriously is not to take them literally. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning. Most.
Almost all true spirituality has a paradoxical character to it, which is why the totally rational or dualistic mind invariably misses the point, and just calls things it does not understand wrong, heresy, or stupid.