Some people live without anything and have everything. The example that always comes to mind for me is in Africa. This little old black African man and I prayed together after a long session. He prayed with such tenderness, saying, "O Lord, help us never to move into stone houses." And everybody echoed, "Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord."
Afterward I asked the missionaries what he had meant. "Well," a priest said, "look at the villages. They're all door-less thatch huts. And so as long as you live a simple life in a thatch hut with no doors, you don't know where your family ends and where the next family begins. You move in and out of one another's lives, and it's all really one family. And there's no possessing, there's no mine and thine; it's ours. It's a world of community." "Once the first stone hut is built in a village," the missionary continued, "very quickly a door and locks are put on it. Immediately the world of mine and thine is created. The entire social worldview, the entire understanding of self, changes but… I'd say you can't see God very well if you spend too much time inside your stone house.Richard Rohr A Spirituality of Subtraction
Courtesy of CatholicIreland.net
Hat tip to Veritas for this - see comment on my previous post!
1 comment:
I thank you so much for this quote about stone houses! I spent one month in Zambia in June 2006. I went with a group sponsored by OMI's. I resonated with the description of mud huts, as I visited so many of those and little villages made up of these. Such a wise comment. How community changes with closed doors.
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