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Almost all the great teachers say something to this effect: “Do not judge.”
But great teachers aren’t asking us to turn off our common sense and our rational minds; they are pointing to something deeper.
The great teachers are saying that you cannot start seeing or understanding anything if you start with “No.”
Richard Rohr, in The Naked Now
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We must be first open to life. For life is the gift we receive and we are (everyone one of us) recipients of life.
Life teaches. Life is the pre-eminent teacher. To live life is to start with “Yes.” “Yes” affirms life and the gift and Give-Giver and our basic shared identity as human beings … sacred vessels.
It has been said that one only knows what one has first loved. It is in the “Yes” to life itself that allows us to see, and know, and grow, understand and experience more fully. The “Yes” avows that in receiving life, we love life and the Gift-Giver.
Absent “Yes” one tracks to divide, distort and isolate. The need to hide or control, deceive and argue soon flourishes when the fundamental “Yes” is denied, ignored.
Absent the primary “Yes,” as Rohr reminds, we are confinded to the shallows of fickled infatuation (from the Latin meaning “false fire”) not the indispensible breath of Love.
You see nothing can be known in its proper form without that First “Yes.”
The “First Yes” brings us to the fullness of human experience – life itself, our True Self, others, The Gift and The Gift Giver.
Shalom.
“The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’ … or he will cease to be anything at all.”
Karl Rahner
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Have you ever asked yourself how Jesus might have experienced life, and faith, and His relationship with The Father?
Our life is more a question of fully experiencing the human and hence divine experience of being a human being than anything else.
Yes, our completion and fullness relies on the full experience of human experience for in that our gift is made for completion – for a joining of mortal and immortal reality.
We are made to know fully – from Aplha to Omega. In this we enter the Mystery. There is: Truth, identity and relationship with God and all others, all things. Therein is contentment, peace, traquility and the absence of fear and doubt, and uncertainty, anger and hostility. Therein is love – the all surpassing love that is of God, that is God.
But alas, we do not see and opt to divide one from another. The lesser among us divide so as to control, claim authority, impose narrow views that they alone conjure up or acquire from some favortite figure whose wandering defied God. Marx comes to mind.
In lesser “gods” is foolishness, conflict, ignorance and illness.
The land is littered with those who foolishly chose ideology over God and doing so they close the mind and heart, and alter all opportunity for wisdom, faith, tranquility, peace, truth, compassion, humility, understanding, the experience of human experience – and the transcendence that is available to all.
Yes, we are an odd lot – given fullness, we seek division and hostility.
It is far better to know how to know than be told what to know. It is far better to know how to see than be told what to see. This is the difference between the curse of ideologues and Christ, between the rote “believer,” and one who believes because he sees and knows from the experience God in the experience of human experience.
When we settle into division – the proclaimation of “me,” “me vs. them,” “us vs. the others” we are the antithesis of fullness in being, we are less than we are made to be, blinded not sighted. You see we are of the Whole, nothing less.
Shalom.
… it is difficult for churches, government, and leaders to move beyond ego, the desire for control, and public posturing. Everything divides into oppositions … vested interests pulling against one another. Truth is no longer possible at this level of conversation.
… you can lead people only as far as you yourself have gone …
Richard Rohr, in The Naked Now
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Richard Rohr writes of two monks of the 11th and 12th century – Hugh of St. Victor monastery in Paris, France, and Richard of the same monastery. He tells us that these monks wrote that humans have been given three different ways of seeing. One way arises from the eyes that produce thoughts. The second way of seeing leads to reason, and to reflection and meditation. The third way of seeing leads to true understanding and contemplation.
It is the third way of seeing that is the rarest and most evolved. Whereas the first way of seeing is common, it produces little depth of experience, is more concrete and binds one to the immediate without nuance. The second way of seeing allows one to relish his or her power to conceive of the material disposition of the world. Ah, but the third way of seeing allows one to do more – it allows one to “taste” existence, to be in awe before the underlying mystery, coherence, and spaciousness that connects one with everything!
The third way of seeing is seeing as a mystic sees – seeing as God has designed us to see. This seeing exceeds the senses, does not rest on knowledge and intellect alone – but rather sees in a manner that expands his or her consciousness – and in this is transformed, made whole, lives in and above at the same time, is mortal and immortal, contented, whole and wise in ways that neither the senses nor intellect can offer.
In commenting on this Rohr says “I cannot emphasize strongly enough that the separation and loss of these three necessary eyes is at the basis of much of the short-sight-edness and religious crises in the Western world.” Hence the above quote that leads into today’s blog.
The view that Rohr shares, Dear Friends, highlights how and why “identity politics” is so destructive, so wrong-headed, so primitive, tribal, hostile, aggressive, hateful and unappetizing. Those with greater depth of human experience cannot abide that which pits one against another in a death struggle. We are, after all, not made to be enemies to one another but rather brothers and sisters to one another.
This historic moment requires us to see as the mystic sees.
Shalom.
Life demands for its completion and fulfillment a balance between joy and sorrow. But because suffering is … disagreeable, people naturally prefer not to ponder how much fear and sorrow fall to the lot of man. So they speak … about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting happiness … is poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled.
Carl Jung, M.D., in Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life (Collected Works, Vol. 16)
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Where are the adults and wisdom figures today? Not in politics. Not in higher education. Not in media. Not in journalism. Not in public life. Not in the law. Surely not in the established bureaucracies of the government. And most assuredly not in entertainment. Not among the Leftists and the whining ideologues, nor among the “professional” advocacy class and the liberals on television or the products of “identity politics.”
Nope, we are short of mature, wise adults.
In large measure this is due to having few people with honestly examined lives. Few who are familiar with human psychology, philosophy, the history of Western Civilization or history itself, few familiar with the Classics of literature, and fewer still who are spiritually developed and hence engaged in faith and guided by a religious narrative.
Super-power notwithstanding, a nation does not survive that is not populated with those who are broadly educated and are humbled by a life in which both joy and sorrow have been experienced.
When I look at the assembled collection of Democrat presidential aspirants I think only of this – “what a motley crew!” Not a one to whom I’d feel comfortable giving a sharpened pencil. Likewise, I prefer not to give attention to anyone in journalism – such is the state of that enterprise today.
So where does this leave one? To the task of independent self-education – becoming familiar with a range of disciplines that instruct as to the collected understanding of the human person for good and ill. And from this base – to the individual life lived to experience and know both joy and sorrow … which renders us sober, grateful, insightful, steady, humble, wise, courageous, faithful and joy-filled.
Alas the miss-mash we see in the nonsense of a secular society stripped of wisdom and insight ought to call us back to common sense, more silence than chatter, and quiet application of life dedicated to proper education and conduct now simply honored in their abandonment.
Shalom.
Happy Easter!!!
“… dying he has destroyed our death, and rising her has restored our life.”
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There is no human life on earth that is not subject to sin and death. Sin fractures relationships with others and indeed fragments our very self. Death is “that ubiquitous reaper.” But Christ changes that default setting that bedevils man and woman, child and adult.
Christ on the Cross redeems each of us from sin and neuters the dread of death, the pain of this mortal exodus. In Christ we are upright in soul and being – sin does not imprison and death does not threaten.
In Christ we have a whole new existence – human wholeness, spiritual expanse, contentment, strength, truth, humility, certainty amid the unknown, community, friendship everlasting. In Christ, all troubles teach and insight and wisdom abounds, patience too.
In Christ, love prevails as love is practiced in all manner of life’s encounters.
Imagine a culture in which consciousness of Christ was for each of us – the substance of each daily transaction, each moment, each idle hour, each day month after month, year after year. Imagine Western Civilization restored to its formative reality – Imagine America and Americans at their historic best – humble, compassionate, brave, sacrificial, honorable, hardworking, strong, independent, dignified, sober, gentle, just, forgiving, confident, grateful for each day and each breath, faithful and kind.
The worm, Friends, is turning. We have gone too long divided, disgruntled, angry, joyless, self-serving and without Christ.
The truth of the matter is quite simple – we need not “fundamentally alter America.” Those who think this are mistaken, ignorant of many things – and in need of faith. For them we might pray.
Shalom.
It is living in the naked moment, the “sacrament of the present moment,” that will teach us how to actually experience our experiences, whether good, bad, or ugly, and how to let them transform us. Words by themselves will invariably divide the moment; pure present lets it be what it is, as it is.
Richard Rohr, in The Naked Now
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There are many things in our present culture that day by day, hour by hour keep us from the full experience of the human experience. Yes, words can distract and the voices of ideologues always do damage – as do the torrent of visual images present in our lives and relentless intrusion of technology and all things digital taken to extremes.
Life is far simpler. Not all meals need be excessive indulgences that morph us into shapes and sizes heretofore not known in human history.
Fix you eye, and heart and mind on the experience of human experience as known throughout the ages by mystics and peasants alike. Stay in the moment, beware of all the yesterdays in your life and in time that hath come before us … yes, those moments long before your mortal birth and all that awaits you beyond this mortal life … be at peace – angelic peace prevails and sits above all that is digression and divisive, alienating and destructive of self and others.
Shalom.
3:03 a.m. – how nice it is to awake in the full night of silence to think about faith
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Faith is a backward-looking virtue. It concerns who we are … “the mystical chords of memory.”
Deirdre N. McCloskey, in The Bourgeois Virtues
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In faith you are connected with those who have come before you – with a stream of being that reaches to the very distant past, the sacrifice of others, their fidelity. Their story is our story.
In faith we belong to others – to Saint Peter and Saint John – to Abraham and Martha and Mary and Lazarus … to Aquinas, St. Augustine, to Simon of Cyrene, the men on the road to Emmaus – to centuries of faithful Jews and Christians.
In faith we have identity … a place in a long story that has no end.
In a world too often focused on the immediate, the immaterial, on desire, immersed in anxiety, loneliness, doubt and worry – we have in faith: certainty, confidence, cause, connection, and a call to life.
In faith we have as Aristotle says “another self,” – in faith is solidarity and union with one another now, in the past and in what is to come. In faith we know love – a love that runs to what has come before, what is now, and what will be in all the tomorrows yet to come.
In faith, particular differences do not matter for the faith others possess is the faith we possess. Ethnicity, race, age, social status, wealth and such do not matter to those who share a faith.
The broad identity of faith is the union of belief. We are, in faith, what we believe. Therein is our solace, our identity, our purpose, our meaning, our stability and our happiness.
Shalom.
Missed posting yesterday. Stood with a friend in a long anticipated hearing on a complicated and contested legal matter. Matter “concluded” at long last.
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The theological virtues are above the nature of man, whereas intellectual and moral virtues belong to the nature of man … Therefore the theological virtues should be distinguished … The intellectual and moral virtues perfect the human intellect and appetite in proportion to human nature, but the theological virtues do so supernaturally.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in Theologiae
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If this be so, how can you neglect faith? If your perfection requires your spiritual development, who would be foolish enough to listen to the endless number of people like Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, A.O.C., et al when they speak about anything whatsoever.
Yes, in the present time, there are not many people in politics, news, the celebrity class, academia, the “professions” or what have you who warrant our time or attention.
Let’s face it, we are NOT discreet listeners. Indeed, we should be.
I often hear others say (in response to some injustice) “how can X or Y let this (the injustice) happen?” It is, in all honesty, a childish reaction to the world around them and injustice in particular. It is a question asked by one who does not know what Aquinas and others have talked about for ages … the primacy of faith and perceptions derived from faith are central to all inquiries and understanding of the world we inhabit and those people and events in it.
Mathematicians know this, scientists too. Those few among us who still muster belief itself and match belief with their intellect and life experience know this as well. They, as a consequence, do not need to ask of injustices done to innocents and others.
Indeed, the proof of the fundamental role of faith in one’s existence is this: even atheists ask the fundamental question like: “Why this injustice?”
Their question confirms the place of, and need for, faith. Their question is a faith question. Their question reflects the insight of Aquinas and many others we ignore and in this make fools of ourselves and anyone of the many who daily listen to the nonsensical “public figures” who do not possess the modest intellect or common sense sufficient to wonder much at all about what they see and what they say.
Alas, following Aquinas and other giants of intellectual, moral and spiritual maturity allows us to be who we are designed to be.
Smarten up, people. What is eternal is above all that is not. We consume what is not eternal and this is the central fault you see.
I know except that things perishing and transitory should be spurned and things certain and eternal should be sought. (Emphasis added.)
St. Augustine, in Soliquia
Just can’t make this any plainer to you, Friends.
Shalom.
Postscript – The contested hearing yesterday was frankly pathetic. The judge and lawyers were childish in their narrow range of thought and lack of depth of examination or understanding as to the events before them. It was much like watching people playing “judge” and “lawyer.” It would have been silly if not so pathetic. We are sadly ill-bred and in this lies decline and injury to all. First faith – insight and wisdom follows.