The benevolence of the soil is endless; it helps one single seed to multiply into millions of seeds for hundreds of years, producing colourful, aromatic, juicy and delicious fruit, feeding birds, bees, humans and animals. The tree celebrates the benevolence of the soil and becomes benevolent in return, offering its fruit to whoever is in need, without condition and without judgement. . . .
The benevolence of the sun is beyond the capacity of words to describe. It burns itself to maintain life. . . . It provides conditions for photosynthesis for the whole plant kingdom to nourish itself and give nourishment to bacteria, insects, birds and animals.
The moon is benevolent. It maintains the cycle of life and cycle of time. Time and tide are sustained by its presence. . . .
Rain is benevolent. It . . . delivers itself to every farm, field, forest, mountain and human habitat, free of charge, without needing any external supply of energy. It moistens the soil, quenches the thirst, fills rivers, ponds, lakes and wells and in partnership with the sun it feeds the world. . . .
Air is benevolent. We breathe, therefore we are. Air is related to the spirit, to inspiration, to spirituality. . . . Air is breath of Brahman, breath of the universe, breath of God. In Sanskrit air is prana, which means life itself. . . .
Space is benevolent. All and everything is held in space and by space. All movements, all changes and every kind of dynamism are sustained in the stillness of space. We always need to be mindful of reducing our clutter and maintaining spaciousness in order to be detached and free.
Soul is benevolent. Compassion, kindness, generosity and inner luminosity are the qualities of the soul. Mind, intelligence, and consciousness are held in and processed by soul. Soul is the seed of life. Feelings, emotions, sentiments, intuition and reason pass through soul and manifest in the world. . . . It is not only humans who have soul; animals, birds, insects and microbes have soul. Soil, trees, rocks and rivers have soul. . . .
The world is how you see it and what you make of it. If you look at the world with benevolent eyes, the world reciprocates with benevolence. If you project suspicion and self-interest, you get the same in return. Trust begets trust and fear begets fear. Recognizing the benevolence of the universe is not to deny the shadow side, but seeing nature as red in tooth and claw and people as selfish and greedy makes us respond in similar vein. If we sow seeds of malevolence, malevolence will grow; if we sow seeds of benevolence, benevolence will grow.
How do you interpret the events of your life? How do you measure them? Do you live your life on the basis that all that there is to you and what you do is wrapped up in the movement, the isolated, circumscribed movement, pulse beat of your little life?
Now, if you do, then you know, you see, that the very nature of life is of such that it is fixed … it is finished, it is complete, and you know you can’t do anything about anything anyway so you don’t try…. Now there is another point of view, and this is the point of view of the prophet. And that is that human life, as well as the lives of nations, takes place within a context that is dynamic. That always when I am in the presence of any event, I am caught in an encounter with a series of potentials that spread out in the widest possible directions and with the most amazing variety of variation. So that if I am alert in the presence of the event, I seek to deal with the event in terms not merely of what it says, what it looks like, but in terms of what seems to me to be the dynamics of the event, the potentials of the event.
Do you deal with events of your life in that way? Do you believe that life is really dynamic? That it isn’t quite finished yet? That not only are you involved always in a circling series of potentials, but that you are potential. You, potential. And no time band, no time interval is able quite to contain you and the dynamics of your life and your situation. Do you believe that?
We must listen, wait, and pray for our charism and call. Most of us are really only good at one or two things. Meditation should lead to a clarity about who we are and, maybe even more, who we are not. This second revelation is just as important as the first. I have found it difficult over the years to sit down and tell people what is not their gift. It is usually very humiliating for individuals to face their own illusions and inabilities. We are not usually a truth-speaking people. We don't speak the truth to one another, nor does our culture encourage the journey toward the True Self. The false self often sets itself up for unnecessary failures and humiliations.
I am self-made. Didn't anyone tell you? I brought myself into the world when I decided to be born on a bright Monday morning. Then I figured out how cells replicate to grow my own arms and legs and head to a reasonable height and size. Then I filled my own mind from kindergarten to graduation with information I gleaned from the great works of literature.
I'm joking, but sometimes it feels like the pressure we are under. An entire self-help and wellness industry made sure that we got the memo: we are supposed to articulate our lives as a solitary story of realization and progress. Work Learn. Fix. Change. Every exciting action sounds like it is designed for an individual who needs to learn how to conquer a world of their own making.
It's hard to remember a deeper, comforting truth: we are built on a foundation not our own. We were born because two other people created a combination of biological matter. We went to schools where dozens and dozens of people crafted ideas and activities to construct categories in our minds. We learned skills honed by generations of craftspeople. We pray and worship with spiritual ideas refined by centuries of tradition. Almost nothing about us is original. Thank God.
It reminds me of the account of creation in Genesis. . .. God breathes oxygen into lungs in an instance of divine CPR. I love picturing that God, the only One who can create out of nothing-ex nihilo. God, who set the cornerstone of our lives and our faith, laid the first brick. The Master Builder whose carefully poured foundation is what we build on top of now. It certainly feels like a template for the rest of our experience.
Kate was a young mother when she was first diagnosed with Stage Four cancer:
When I was really sick and worried about dying too young, I kept trying to picture how much my son would remember.
I thought about him all the time. When do children develop long-term memory? How much am I in there . .. his mischievous mind, his evil laugh Then one day, my psychologist said something wonderful. He said: "Kate, you're in there. The foundation is the part that doesn't show."
Whether it is our parents, our teachers, mentors, friends, churches, or neighbors, people have been pouring into us. We are standing on a foundation. It should come as an incredible relief. Our only job is to build on what we've been given, and, even then, even our gifts we can trace back to the creativity, generosity, and foresight of others. Thank God we are a group project.
The shadow is that part of the self that we don’t want to see, we don’t want others to see, and of which we’re always afraid. Our tendency is to try to hide it or deny it, even and most especially from ourselves. Jesus, quoting the prophet Isaiah, describes it as “listening but not understanding, seeing but not perceiving” (Matthew 13:14–15).
Archaic religion and most of the history of religion has seen the shadow as the problem. Such religion is about getting rid of the shadow. This is the classic example of dealing with the symptom instead of the cause. We cannot really get rid of the shadow. We can only expose its game—which is, in great part, to get rid of its effects.
Jesus and the prophets deal with the cause, which is the ego. Our problem is not our shadow self as much as our over-defended ego, which always sees and hates its own faults in other people, and thus avoids its own conversion.
Jesus’ phrase for the denied shadow is “the plank in your own eye,” which you invariably see as the “splinter in your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:3–5). Jesus’ advice is absolutely perfect: “Take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your neighbor’s eye.” He does not deny that we should deal with evil, but we had better do our own inner housecleaning first—in a most radical way, which he will later even hyperbolically describe as plucking out our eye (Matthew 18:9). If we do not see our own “plank,” it is inevitable that we will hate it elsewhere.
The genius of Jesus is that he wastes no time on repressing or denying the shadow. In that, he is a classic prophet, one of those who does not merely expose the denied shadow of Israel, but instead attacks the real problem, which is the ego and arrogance of Israel and people misusing power. Once we expose the shadow for what it is, its game is over. Its effectiveness entirely depends on disguise (see 2 Corinthians 11:14) and not seeing the plank in our own eye. Once we see our own plank, the “speck” in our neighbor’s eye becomes inconsequential.
Jesus is not too interested in moral purity because he knows that any preoccupation with repressing the shadow does not lead us into personal transformation, empathy, compassion, or patience, but invariably into denial or disguise, repression or hypocrisy. Isn’t that rather evident? Immature religion creates a high degree of cognitively rigid people or very hateful and attacking people—and often both. It is almost the public image of Christianity today, yet God’s goal is exactly the opposite.
It’s clear that if someone wants to be elected to a political office in the United States or any country, all they need to do is assure people of safety. Bill Plotkin, who’s been such a wonderful influence on so many people in recent decades, speaks of the first half of life as our survival dance, and the second half of life as our sacred dance. [1] Most people never get beyond their survival dance. It’s just identity questions, boundary questions, superiority questions, and security questions. We would call them ego questions, but they’re not questions of the soul.
The soul moves beyond questions of security and importance because it has discovered that it is absolutely important.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. Probably most cultures and individuals across history have been situated in the first half of their own development up to now, because it is all they had time for. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.
But it takes us much longer to discover “the task within the task,” as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.... Problematically, the first task invests so much of our blood, sweat, tears, and years that we often cannot imagine there is a second task, or that anything more could be expected of us. “The old wineskins are good enough,” we say, even though according to Jesus they often cannot hold the new wine. According to him, if we do not get some new wineskins, “the wine and the wineskin will both be lost” (Luke 5:37–39). The second half of life can hold some new wine because by then there should be some strong wineskins, some tested ways of holding our lives together. But that normally means that the container itself has to stretch, die in its present form, or even replace itself with something better.
Various traditions have used many metaphors to make this differentiation clear: beginner and proficient, novices and initiated, milk and meat, letter and spirit, juniors and seniors, baptized and confirmed, apprentice and master, morning and evening, “Peter when you were young … Peter when you are old” (John 21:18). Only when we have begun to live in the second half of life can we see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary. We cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it. Grace must and will edge us forward. “God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself.
No pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do the journey for us. If we try to skip the first journey, we will never receive its real fruits or understand its limitations.
A blatant contradiction between message and action is holding us back in every part of the world. Christians too often preach a self-absorbed gospel of piety and religiosity, rather than a “lifestyle gospel.” The gospel is so radical that if we truly believed its message, it would call into question all the assumptions we currently hold about the way we live, how we use our time, whom we relate to, how we marry, and how much money we have. Everything we think and do would be called into question and viewed in a new way.
I believe that we rather totally missed Jesus’ major point when we made a religion out of him instead of realizing he was giving us a message of simple humanity, vulnerability, and nonviolence that was necessary for the reform of all religions—and for the survival of humanity. We need to dedicate our lives to building bridges and paying the price in our bodies for this ministry of reconciliation (Ephesians 2:13–18). The price is that we will always, like all bridges, be walked on from both sides. Reconcilers are normally “crucified,” and the “whole world hates them,” because they are neither on one side nor the other. They build the vulnerable bridge in between, which always looks like an abdication of ground to the supposedly “true believer.”
Jesus is a person and, at the same time, a process. Jesus is the Son of God, but at the same time he is “the Way.” Jesus is the goal, but he’s also the means, and the means is always the way of the cross.
For all authentic spiritual teachers, their message is the same as their life; their life is their message. For some reason, we want the “person” of Jesus as our “God totem,” but we really do not want his path and message of “descent” except as a functional theology of atonement: this is what Jesus needed to do to “save us.” We do not want to see the cross as the pattern of life and a path for our own liberation. We prefer heavenly transactions to our own transformation.
The way of the cross looks like failure. In fact, we could say that Christianity is about how to win by losing, how to let go creatively, how the only real ascent is descent. We need to be more concerned with following Jesus, which he told us to do numerous times, and less with worshipping Jesus—which he never once told us to do.
And that’s why we still have racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism at the highest levels. Christianity has too often shown itself to be well-disguised narcissism. I congratulate Bill Wilson and Twelve-Step spirituality, because just like Thérèse of Lisieux, they named it. They said powerlessness is the beginning of the spiritual journey.
Likewise, if you’re in a moment of joy, like real joy over something, be joyful, but be detached from your joy. Because the joy is finite, the joy is ephemeral, the joy is passing away. Enjoy it but realize that compared to the eternal joy—“the joy that death does not have the power to destroy”—this joy that you’re experiencing is fleeting. Don’t get hung up over your joy. Be detached from joy.
Finley offers wisdom he learned from Thomas Merton (1915–1968), who was his novice master when Finley was a young monk: Often, when I’d go in to see Thomas Merton for spiritual direction, he’d say, “How’s it going?” And I’d say, “I’m doing well!” And he’d say, “Don’t make much of it; it’ll get worse.” And other times I would go in really down about something. And he’d say, “Don’t make much of it; it’ll get better.”
It ebbs and flows, it ebbs and flows.
Unfortunately, in the West, we don’t let go of anything. We hold onto reputation and material goods long after they are no longer needed. We store acquired stuff in every nook and household cranny before renting a storage unit so that we can continue to hold onto our stuff. Dazed, we clutch at relationships long after they are on life support and cling to a past that no longer exists, grasping, desperate, and confused.
We say that we are letting go, but, in our society, letting go is more like a tug of war. We diligently guard our stories (true or not), our lifestyles, and our belief systems until they are ripped from our sweaty palms. And yet, letting go is a necessary part of transformation….
Letting go may be the only path toward rebirth. The truth of the matter is that we are clutching at nothing! The stripping has already begun. When the worst happens, our addictive desire for control and the futility of our desires are fully exposed. If we are wise, we open our minds, our hands, and our hearts, and let go.
However, I do not want to mislead you: Letting go has consequences. Finally, the striving is over, the effort to salvage and fix, be or do something, is over. It is as if we have been clinging to the wall of a mountain of our own making, a mountain of expectations, striving, and goals. When that mountain disappears, we plummet….
When we let go, the only constants are God’s love and God’s promise that we will never be left alone. We let go of our public persona and our striving and pursuits. Sometimes it takes a crisis to remind us that we are not in control. This space that I name contemplative is a place of breaking, relinquishment, and waiting. [1]
Writer and former pastor Felicia Murrell describes the inherent uncertainty of transition:
In the radiance of dark, there is process:
the unfolding of mystery,
things words cannot articulate,
a threshold to freedom the mind cannot comprehend.
But the body feels,
the heart knows:
This is liminality.
The threshold of transition,
from death to life, from evening to morn,
from gestation to giving birth.
The unknown is a part of it all.
The spiritual dimension is this: We now imagine drawing a vertical line intersecting right in the middle of the horizontal line. The vertical line is the divine dimension, divinity, God, the Holy, the sacred. And the infinite love of God, the Holy, is welling up, presence-ing itself and pouring itself out as our lives on the horizontal line. This is the God-given, godly nature of every breath and heartbeat. It is the sun moving across the sky, our breathing in and breathing out, the miracle of being alive and real in the world. Religious experience is the experience of tasting it and realizing this miracle. By following a path of faith and reassurance, God illumines us on the horizontal line. The difficulty is that as depression increases, it closes off experiential access to that vertical line, the upwelling of God’s presence in our life.
If we have religious faith and we experience depression, often our faith doesn’t mean anything to us anymore. It ceases to be relevant. Not only do we feel we have lost our own way in life, but we’ve also lost the felt sense of God being present in our lives. The absence of feeling God’s presence radicalizes the sense of our loss. A lot of therapy, then, isn’t only about moving along the horizontal line to reduce the symptoms of depression—although it is that—but doing it in such a way that it starts to open up the depth dimension. The infinite love of God can come welling up, and something of the depth dimension can begin to shine through in our dilemmas. It isn’t just that we’re caught in the middle of a dilemma, but we have a felt sense of knowing that we’re not alone.
God has been trying through all of history to give away God. Jesus shows us that the gift is free and totally available, as available as our breath. It seems that God has a hard time giving away God, however, because most of us aren’t interested. We’re interested in other things: money and power and success and good looks and politics. It takes a long time to get around to the one thing we were created for.
If you’ve ever ridden on the subways in London, before the doors open and you get out of the train, they say, “Mind the gap.” When the doors open, it’s written in big words in front of every door: “Mind the gap.” It means, of course, that there are a few inches between the doors and the sidewalk, and they don’t want anyone to fall in that gap.
In teaching on the Holy Spirit, what we need to do is “mind the gap”—because the Holy Spirit fills the gaps of everything. First, we need to be aware that there usually is a gap. There’s a space because we don’t recognize that God is as available to us as our breath. We always allow God, by our own silliness and stupidity, to be distant, to be elsewhere. We always find a gap between ourselves and our neighbor, between ourselves and almost everything. We therefore feel quite lonely and isolated in this world. Without some awareness of the Holy Spirit’s presence, frankly, we’re not connected to anything or anybody. We just live an isolated life.
The Holy Spirit within us is the desire inside all of us that wants to keep connecting, relating, and communing. It isn’t above us. It isn’t beyond us—it is within us. It’s as available as our breath, and that’s why the Risen Christ gives the Holy Spirit by breathing upon the disciples. He’s saying, in effect, “Here it is! Here it is! Can you breathe in what I have breathed out?”
We must first remember who we are! Our core, our deepest DNA, is divine; it is the Spirit of Love implanted within us by our Creator at the first moment of our creation (see Romans 5:5, 8:11, 14–16). [1]
Those who have gone to their depths uncover an indwelling Presence. It is a deep and loving “yes” inherent within us. Christian theology names this inner Presence as the Holy Spirit, which is precisely God as immanent, within, and even our deepest and truest self. [2]
Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff describes the signs of this interior awakening to the Spirit: The principal characteristic of human beings is our role as bearers of consciousness, of intelligence—in a word, of the spirit. The spirit infuses the whole universe from its very beginning, but in human beings it becomes self-aware and free....
Nothing shows the presence of the spirit in human life as well as love does…. When love is expressed as compassion, the spirit enables us to come out of ourselves, put ourselves in the other’s place, bend over the person fallen by the wayside. In forgiveness we transcend ourselves, so that the past does not have the last word and cannot close off the present and the future.
The highest expression of the spirit is the one that opens us to the Great Other, in love and trust. It establishes a dialogue with God, listens from the conscience to God’s call, and delivers us trustingly into the palm of God’s hand. This communion can be so intense, say the mystics of every tradition, that the soul of the beloved is fused with the Lover in an experience of nonduality; by grace we participate in God’s very being. Here the human spirit is touching the hem of the Holy Spirit’s garment. [3]
Richard writes:
Some saints and mystics have described this Presence as “closer to me than I am to myself” or “more me than I am myself.” Yet this True Self still must be awakened and chosen. The Holy Spirit is given equally to all; but it must be received, too. People who totally receive this Presence and draw life from it are the ones we traditionally call saints.
The Holy Spirit is never created by our actions or behavior; it is naturally indwelling, our inner being with God. In Catholic theology, we call the Holy Spirit “Uncreated Grace.” Culture and even religion often teach us to live out of our false self of reputation, self-image, role, possessions, money, appearance, and so on. Only as this fails us, and it always eventually does, will the Holy Spirit within us stand revealed and ready to guide us.
From this more spacious and grounded place, one naturally connects, empathizes, forgives, and loves just about everything. We were made in love, for love, and unto love. This deep inner “yes” is God in us, already loving God through us. [4]
If we can’t be positively present right now without creating a problem, nothing new is ever going to happen. We will only experience what we already agree with and what does not threaten us and our preferred mode of being. We will never experience the unexpected depth and contentment that is always being offered to us.
Notice that the Scriptures present God as a thief, or a master who returns before being expected (see Matthew 24:42–46), who even “puts on an apron, sits them at table and waits on them” (see Luke 12:35–38)! Do we even realize what an extraordinary notion of God Jesus must have had to talk that way? God waiting on us! No problem to solve—just an immediate intimacy to enjoy.
It is just such a moment that can elicit both awe and surrender from within us: awe before the utterly undeserved and unexpected—and some sweet surrender to the fact that it might just be true. [1]
The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awe followed by a process of surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves! This is the great inner dialogue we call prayer. Yet we humans resist both the awe and, even more, the surrender. Both together are vital, and so we must practice.
The way to any universal idea is to proceed through a concrete encounter. The one is the way to the many; the specific is the way to the spacious; the now is the way to the always; the here is the way to the everywhere; the material is the way to the spiritual; the visible is the way to the invisible. When we see contemplatively, we know that we live in a fully sacramental universe, where everything is an epiphany. While philosophers tend toward universals and poets love particulars, mystics and contemplative practice teach us how to encompass both. [2]
We have to work at it and develop practices whereby we recognize our compulsive and repetitive patterns. In doing so, we allow ourselves to be freed from the need to “take control of the situation”—as if we ever really could anyway!
It seems we are addicted to our need to make distinctions and judgments, which we mistake for thinking. Most of us think we are our thinking, yet almost all thinking is compulsive, repetitive, and habitual. We are forever writing our inner commentaries on everything, commentaries that always reach the same practiced conclusions. That is why all forms of meditation and contemplation teach a way of quieting this compulsively driven and unconsciously programmed mind.
The Desert Fathers and Mothers wisely called this process “the shedding of thoughts.” We don’t fight, repress, deny, identify with, or even judge them, but merely shed them. We are so much more than our thoughts about things, and we will feel this more as an unlearning than a learning of any new content. [1]
When we meditate consistently, a sense of our autonomy and private self-importance—what we think of as our “self”—falls away, little by little, as unnecessary, unimportant, and even unhelpful. The imperial “I,” the self that we likely think of as our only self, reveals itself as largely a creation of our mind.
Through a regular practice of contemplation, we become less and less interested in protecting this self-created, relative identity. We don’t have to attack it; it calmly falls away of its own accord and we experience a kind of natural humility.
If our prayer goes deep, “invading” our unconscious, as it were, our whole view of the world will change from fear to connection. We don’t live inside our fragile and encapsulated self anymore, nor do we feel any need to protect it. In meditation, we move from ego consciousness to soul awareness, from being fear-driven to being love-drawn. That’s it in a few words!
Of course, we only have the courage to do this if Someone Else is holding us, taking away our fear, doing the knowing, and satisfying our desire for a Great Lover. If we can allow that Someone Else to lead us in this dance, we will live with new vitality, a natural gracefulness, and inside of a Flow that we did not create. It is the Life of the Trinity, spinning through us. [2]
Such good news is just too good, too impossible, too distant. We say, “Lord, I am not worthy.” Of course we’re not worthy, but the good news is that worthiness is not even the issue. Who among us is worthy? Am I worthy? Is the bishop worthy? Are the priests worthy? Are the Franciscans worthy? I don’t think so. We’re all just varying degrees of fallible and unworthy, but when we surrender to that reality/identity/knowing, the fountain of grace begins to flow. We stop seeking our own worthiness and we begin to know the gift of God. We begin to realize that it’s all gift, and it’s all free, and we already have it, and all we can do is learn to enjoy it. That changes everything.
Monday
We stop seeking our own worthiness and we begin to know the gift of God. We begin to realize that it’s all gift, and it’s all free, and we already have it, and all we can do is learn to enjoy it. That changes everything.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace.
—Anne Lamott
Wednesday
To understand the gospel in its radical, transformative power, we have to stop counting, measuring, and weighing. We have to stop saying “I deserve” and deciding who does not deserve. This daily conversion is hard to do unless we’ve experienced infinite mercy and realize that it’s all a gift—all the time.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
Jesus established a table of hospitality where all are guests and no one owes anything to anyone else. Around this table, gifts pass without regard to payback or debt. Everyone sits. Everyone eats. And, recognizing that everything is a gift, all are grateful.
—Diana Butler Bass
Friday
In the world of grace and freedom, for a channel to be opened, it must flow forward, through, and toward something else—or the channel becomes blocked. The positive and appreciative response demands consciousness and choice—and freedom on our part.
—Richard Rohr
Heschel lived out a holistic balance of delight and awe, radical amazement, and prophetic challenge.
At the heart of Heschel’s mystical vision is the experience of radical amazement.… Wonder is essential to both spirituality and theology: “Awe is a sense for the transcendence.… It enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine.”
Wonder leads to the experience of radical amazement at God’s world. Created in the image of God, each of us is amazing. Wonder leads to spirituality and ethics. As Heschel noted, “Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy. The moment is the marvel.”
Heschel considers the significance of a worldview of radical amazement:
The world presents itself in two ways to me. The world as a thing I own, the world as a mystery I face. What I own is a trifle, what I face is sublime. I am careful not to waste what I own; I must learn not to miss what I face.
We manipulate what is available on the surface of the world; we must also stand in awe before the mystery of the world. We objectify Being but we also are present at Being in wonder, in radical amazement.
All we have is a sense of awe and radical amazement in the face of a mystery that staggers our ability to sense it….
Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.
Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for the … mystery beyond all things. It enables us … to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe.
Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition; faith is attachment to transcendence, to the meaning beyond the mystery.
Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.
Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you. The loss of awe is the avoidance of insight. A return to reverence is the first prerequisite for a revival of wisdom, for the discovery of the world as an allusion to God.
The Creator brought it all into being, and now some fourteen billion years later, here we find ourselves: dancers in this beautiful, mysterious choreography that expands and evolves and includes us all. We’re farmers and engineers, parents and students, theologians and scientists, teachers and shopkeepers, builders and fixers, drivers and doctors, dads and moms, wise grandparents and wide-eyed infants.
Don’t we all feel like poets when we try to speak of the beauty and wonder of this creation? Don’t we share a common amazement about our cosmic neighborhood when we wake up to the fact that we’re actually here, actually alive, right now?...
The romance of Creator and creation is far more wonderful and profound than anyone can ever capture in words. And yet we try, for how could we be silent in the presence of such beauty, glory, wonder, and mystery? How can we not celebrate this great gift—to be alive?
To be alive is to look up at the stars.... and to feel the beyond-words awe of space in its vastness. To be alive is to look down from a mountaintop ... and to feel the wonder that can only be expressed in “oh” or “wow” or maybe “hallelujah.” To be alive is to look out from the beach toward the horizon at sunrise or sunset and to savor the joy of it all in pregnant, saturated silence. [It’s] to gaze in delight at a single bird, tree, leaf, or friend, and to feel that they whisper of a creator or source we all share.
Genesis means “beginnings.” It speaks through deep, multilayered poetry and wild, ancient stories. The poetry and stories of Genesis reveal deep truths that can help us be more fully alive today. They dare to proclaim that the universe is God’s self-expression, God’s speech act. That means that everything everywhere is always essentially holy, spiritual, valuable, meaningful. All matter matters….
Genesis describes the “very goodness” that comes at the end of a long process of creation…. That harmonious whole is so good that the Creator takes a day off, as it were, just to enjoy it. That day of restful enjoyment tells us that the purpose of existence isn’t money or power or fame or security or anything less than this: to participate in the goodness and beauty and aliveness of creation.
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