Falling in love again...

Sit by the stream, on the edge. Don't let the ego try to fix, to control, categorize or ensure any of your experience. The ego wants to ensure that things are significant, that events make us important. Our activities become little righteousness trips, and we stand on our certitude.

"I've done 'this much' in my life," we say. "I was faithful to my husband; I raised my children; I sent them to a Catholic school; I paid my bills." But these are often self- serving kinds of duty and responsibility. Much religion is using God to bolster our own self-image. True religion is not attached to self-image, but to God.

Christian life has little to do with me doing anything right. It has everything to do with falling in love with a Lover who does everything right. What I love is that Lover and not my own accomplishments.

from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr

I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance. I know that you cannot tolerate evildoers; you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them to be false. I also know that you are enduring patiently and bearing up for the sake of my name, and that you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember then from what you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. (Revelation 2.2-5a)

Once again Richard Rohr applies to the Catholic church a criticism I would want to apply much more widely! We are all guilt of this, in our own lives, in how we achieve, or fail to achieve, our "self-esteem" and in how we see ourselves in our communities. But we are guilty of it as churches too. This attitude underlies much of the present grief of the Episcopal Church in the USA, and it underpins much of the controlling "heavy shepherding" of many of the newer evangelical/charismatic churches.

If only we could take our eyes off ourselves, and off our own reflections in our sisters' and brothers' eyes, we might see Christ looking back at us; and at the end of Advent, we might hear his words to Peter again, "What is that to you? Follow me..." (John 21.22)

Peter listened, and look what happened...