A good friend and wise woman sent me this article, I wanted to share a bit of it with you,enjoy..........
oh! and by the way " Happy New Year Everyone".
I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God.
Paradoxes don't scare me anymore.
When I was young, I couldn't tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations.
Now, at age 63, it's all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe -- I've counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.
Whenever I think there's a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say "only" or "always," someone or something proves me wrong.
My scientist friends have come up with things like "principles of uncertainty" and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories.
But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of "faith"!
How strange that the very word "faith" has come to mean its exact opposite.
People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It's the people who don't know who usually pretend that they do.
People who've had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don't know. They are utterly humbled before mystery.
They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is -- quite sadly -- absent from much of our religious conversation today.
My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.
by Richard Rohr
2 comments:
Bethany, I just read the articles they are great. I hope we will all post things we run across that we think others will find interesting or support our conversation.
Do you know how we can organize our Blog so that we have one central conversation that shows up when we log in and can read the latest comments that people have made always on top? Can we post articles and longer references on a side list? I am not at all being critical just wondering where to post to continue our conversation.
I had to dig to find the original post. I think you are the administrator.
Can you see if you can get one stable blog to stay open?
John
o.k. i'll try and let you know. but give me some time an you know my hanicap {{giggle}}
Post a Comment