Monthly Archives: November 2024
God’s Love Includes Imperfection by Richard Rohr
On The Cosmic We podcast, Richard Rohr explores on how opening ourselves to the flow of God’s unconditional love allows us to pass it on:
We’ve failed to communicate the unique nature of divine love. Divine love is infinite, but the notion of infinity cannot be conceived by the human mind. We can’t help but turn back to adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, one of my favorite Catholic mystics, shares, “There is a science about which [God] knows nothing—addition!” [1] What she was trying to say was that once we dive into infinity, which is God, any notion of adding, subtracting, meriting, losing, being worthy, is all a waste of time. God’s love is infinite, a concept the human mind cannot form. The divine notion of perfection isn’t the exclusion of imperfection, but the inclusion of imperfection. That’s divine love.
Human love thinks we have to exclude imperfection to love a person. But I’m old enough to know there’s no perfect people around. They don’t exist. We’ve all learned to keep hidden our little secret or shadow self. But divine love includes imperfection, which is what makes it divine love. Without the grace of God, we cannot do that. We pay attention to the imperfection: “I saw him do that. I heard her say that.” Then we have identified our reason not to love and we can feel superior and even “damn” the other person. That’s what I mean when I say Jesus became a scapegoat because he knew that the human pattern of scapegoating always makes someone else the problem instead of ourselves. Christianity is not about changing other people—it isn’t! It’s nice if people do change, but that’s God’s work. It’s about changing ourselves, and that never stops. I’m 80 years old and I’m still trying to change myself.
In one of his letters, Paul says, “The yes is always found in Christ,” the yes to reality (see 2 Corinthians 1:20). We are living in love if we can maintain a daily yes. That doesn’t mean we don’t recognize injustice and stand against it, but we don’t let our hearts become hardened and our minds become rigid in its judgments. Love is always a yes. Even though we might see little or big problems, we don’t let it stop the yes. I find in my old age that I’ve eventually had to forgive everything. Everything! Myself, my parents, the Catholic Church, the United States of America.
The Dance of Gender Differences
Christianity was created by men, the bible was written by men, religion has been controlled completely until very recently by men. Women and men most often are born with different traits (not always.) God created us different so we would bond across those differences, which working together could make each other and the world a better place. The Working Together in a dance is the goal…..different strengths are needed for different challenges and times. To have balance there needs to be freedom to take turns leading in the dance. The spiritual journey changes us throughout our life. At 87 I’ve recognized how I have changed my view of everything, including God and Jesus and other religions, over my journey. Jesus fleshes out the spiritual journey in a way I personally can learn from, so he’s my “go to” guy. But I figure I will probably still be seeing new aspects of our life journeys on my death bed! No person or religion has all the truth, nothing but the truth, even with the help of God (which would make us equal to God!) Once we recognize that we are all one and that God is Love by any name, we can trust the spirit within. Then we can roll with the changes in this life. It is a school for learning to Love…our own unfinished, so flawed , selves and thus even the enemy who is unfinished like us but in different aspects. We actually NEED each other to help us become whole.
Same Song…Hoping if I Sing it Enough It Will be Heard and Understood
We are born innocent, but unfinished. We are born totally needy. Our spiritual journey is from need to being able to love an other or others more than ourselves. That was the WAY of Jesus. You can see him grow in understanding and in capacity for love in the Scriptures. His potential was to be perfect in love. We are born with different potentials….not necessarily going to be the same or perfect, but just fulfilling our personal potential for love. My experience has been that my last years have been a time of recognizing my journey from need to love and recognizing how slow it has been and that since I’m still here, I must still need to grow in my capacity for loving others more than myself. And the reality is that people who are different from us are harder to love up close than in theory. And they are having the same challenge!
One of the keys to loving is recognizing we didn’t get a choice about our unfinished personality or upbringing and neither did others. We may disagree strongly and work to bring about our view of a better world, but we cannot judge people as stupid or evil., they are playing the hand they were dealt the best they know how and judging them makes it impossible to ever learn how to work together using a balance of our natural inborn strengths..
Ignorance: The Human Condition
Reflections on Facing our Failures and Ignorance.
I have been sharing some of my struggles with facing particular failures to communicate my love. When I am able to forgive myself for being just a normal flawed human being, I experience a wonderful peace and a moment of sensing the unconditional love of God. This frees me to be real. Matt in our Sunday School class experiences that in his journey through AA. Ever since my conversion at thirty from agnosticism to Jesus as a source of grace for my spiritual journey, I’ve suspected that AA is closer to the early church experience than today’s Christian religions.
I do not agree completely with any denomination, but I may change in my few years left, because it is a spiritual journey with stages of spiritual growth all along the way. I don’t think anyone dies as a perfect human being, but I think we may make it to our personal best. And personal best probably varies greatly between us. This is why we CANNOT judge, because we don’t KNOW the hand anyone is dealt or how a particular life has affected them. We can be against what they do, but we can not write them off as stupid or evil. They may be smart at practical things, but not have the type of mind it takes to see the big picture, to understand those different from them, or worry about a future they have not yet witnessed. Some people may be very logical and not in touch with their own feelings, so they unwittingly tramp on ours. And if we tend to live in feeling mode, we may think they are being intentionally cruel. Ignorance is not the same as stupidity. And we are all ignorant.
Even those of us that consider ourselves intelligent and have minds that can make connections and visualize possibilities are ignorant. Most of us can not fix car engines or make our own clothes, unless that is what our parents emphasized and taught us.
Our politics are controlled by our personal way of being in the world at birth unless our significant others as children were different from us and remain our mentors. With enough LOVING challenges by those whose love we trust, we CAN change, but it’s part of our personal journey and may only happen late in life.
We can only influence those different from us with enough love that it can overcome their fear of change. That usually takes a one-on-one loving close relationship.
I got scholarships to several prestigious colleges. I chose Rice University for practical reasons. Everyone was on a full scholarship there, but at that time it was predominantly a school for scientists and engineers. I hated it! (Except that there were four boys for every girl, and I had gone to an all-girls high school!) I married out with some poor grades. I returned to college in my thirties, majoring in psychology which had changed a great deal by then, and I graduated summa cum laude. (God is in the timing.) My actual knowledge is mostly in what I am naturally good at. That is such a tiny percentage of all possible knowledge that my ignorance is humongously greater than my knowledge. This was also true for Einstein! It’s true for everyone though each generation adds to knowledge. (Not necessarily to wisdom!)
We are all ignorant. Some are considered smart and some intelligent. These are different and we need both. When we consider people stupid and show it and make them feel that way, there is no hope of sharing our different gifts across the gap.
Language is a big part of the problem. And I don’t mean the language of different countries.
I used to argue with my psychology professors about the point of creating/using language that was unique to our field. If psychology was a hope for understanding ourselves and each other, it was counterproductive to make it “technical” and limited to professionals in the field.
One of the kindest, most delightful people I ever knew grew up poor and got pregnant and dropped out of school at 15. She was competent and talented in both practical things and things of visual beauty in life. But after she joined a small Episcopalian church of intellectuals, she would often be sad, because much of the language used in Sunday School was unfamiliar to her. It made her feel stupid, so she didn’t ask what words meant. Often “intellectuals” speak their own language and consider anyone who doesn’t understand it as “stupid.” This woman was not only NOT stupid, she was a person in touch with her feelings who had been poor growing up and she became the “heart” of that church starting clothing drives for the poor and a church flower garden and often fixing delicious dinners for the whole church.
Some of the “saints‘ among us may not understand our language, won’t benefit from our ability to recognize dangers and the solutions to future problems.
As “intellectuals” we may care about immigrants who don’t speak our language, but not recognize how we are alienating our own people with our versions of everyday English.
Our problems are much more complex than just this issue, but I think this is the one we don’t recognize.
Motivation
Here’s my take on motivation in life:
Greed gives the illusion of importance.
Importance brings the possibility of power.
Power is about control.
Because control fosters the illusion of safety.
And we all, even women, want safety for ourselves and our loved ones.
Sometimes, without realizing it, we make faith about our need to feel safe.
But the journey of Jesus, who calls us to follow him, was not about safety,
It was about love and ultimately even about love for our enemies.
“There are these three: Faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is Love.”
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 