I've had a difficult time entering back into the blogging world since our trip to Wyoming. I don't know if I will be posting every day.... I don't know if I will be posting every week... I am simply taking some time to discern.
As for today, I pass along a message from Richard Rohr. I hope to be back on board soon. Love and peace to you all.
Yaya
How can we look at the Biblical text in a manner that will convert
us or change us? I am going to define the Bible in a new way for some of you. The
Bible is an honest conversation with humanity about where power really is.
All spiritual texts, including the Bible, are books whose primary focus lies
outside of themselves, in the Holy Mystery. The Bible is to illuminate your
human experience through struggling with it. It is not a substitute for human
experience. It is an invitation into the struggle itself—you are supposed to be
bothered by some of the texts. Human beings come to consciousness by struggle,
and most especially struggle with God and sacred texts. We largely remain
unconscious if we avoid all conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes, inconsistencies, or
contradictions.
The
Bible is a book filled with conflicts and paradoxes and historical
inaccuracies. It is filled with contradictions and it is precisely in learning
to struggle with these seeming paradoxes that we grow up—not by avoiding them
with a glib one-sentence answer that a 16-year-old can memorize. If I had
settled for the mostly one-line answers to everything from my Fr. McGuire’s
Baltimore Catechism, my spiritual journey would have been over in the
third grade. And for many people, otherwise educated in other fields, that is
exactly what happened. We created people with quick answers instead of humble
searchers for God and truth, which never just falls into your lap, but is only
given as a gift to those who really want it and desire it.
From A
Teaching on Wondrous Encounters, by Richard Rohr, (webcast) (CD/DVD/MP3
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