Good morning…
I hate it when I spend early morning hours crafting a blog post, and then a misguided mistake makes it vanish, disappear, blip away in an instant. Of course it’s me. I swipe wrong. I touch something I shouldn’t. My non-technical mind makes some errant error. I hate it when I spend early morning hours crafting a blog post, and then it’s just gone, gone for good. That is exactly what happened yesterday, and I just had to take a breather, walk away from the computer, and discern a new discovery (hence the 10:57 am arrival of our Monday morning message).
Yet here is one thing I have learned over the years: often the messages that go mysteriously missing hold very important truth. The enemy of God might not want some life-giving messages to spread, so in some zany way key content zaps away. Whenever this happens, I check in with God and if I get the nod, I redouble my efforts to recreate God’s words of wisdom the following day. So here we go again.
The book quote I will retype now made a huge impact in our living room this week. In both our Friday and our Monday classes I read these two pages out loud, and we were all blown away as God’s Spirit enlivened among us creative, collaborative conversation. Meaningful. Miraculous. Mind-blowing. These two pages contain empowering wisdom, wisdom I believe God loves and God’s enemy hates.
******
Excerpt from Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life
Because important things bear repeating in different forms, let me summarize the direction of my thought here. I am saying that
- We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line.
- We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half to our life. There is a God-sized hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.
- We dare not try to fill our souls and our minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usually listed “hot sins.” God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and our failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church.
- If we go to the depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, “real,” and with a timeless quality to it. We will be moving from the starter kit of “belief” to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if you have ever (1) loved deeply, (2) accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, (3) or stood in genuine life-changing awe before mystery, time, or beauty.
- This “something real” is what all the world religions were pointing to when they spoke of heaven, nirvana, bliss, or enlightenment. They were not wrong at all; their only mistake was that they pushed it off into the next world. If heaven is later, it is because it is first of all now.
- These events become the pledge, guarantee, hint, and promise of an eternal something. Once you touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the Real, has to be forever. Call it wishful thinking, if you will, but this insistence has been a constant intuition since the beginning of humanity. Jesus made it into a promise, as when he tells the Samaritan woman that “the spring within her will well up unto eternal life” (John 4:14). In other words, heaven/union/love now emerge from within us, much more than from a mere belief system or any belonging system, which largely remains outside of the self. (94-96)
******
These are the two things I felt inspired to say after reading Rohr’s rich words aloud in class.
- This is exactly what Jesus taught. “This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…'” (Matthew 6:9-10, NIV). This, the Lord’s Prayer, is repeated aloud and in unison each week in many Christian churches. Jesus put on skin and came to earth so that God’s will could be done in this world, here and now, in and through us, in the exact same way God’s will is forever being done in heaven.
- The hand-painted, white-washed quote hanging in the half bath beside our living room sums up exactly what Jesus, Christian churches, and Richard Rohr are saying. “All this and heaven as well.” (See photo above.) We are each designed to experience heaven/union/love emerging from within us, in the here and now, during our day-in-and-day-out lives, as God’s kingdom is established on earth just as it is exists in heaven. In addition, we also look forward to the joy of heaven/union/love in full measure in the next world, with God and with our loved ones for an eternity.
[God Set Eternity in the Heart of Man] He has made everything beautiful and appropriate in its time. He has also planted eternity [a sense of divine purpose] in the human heart [a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy, except God]—yet man cannot find out (comprehend, grasp) what God has done (His overall plan) from the beginning to the end (Ecclesiastes 3:11, AMP).
…Sue…
