Meister Eckhart said that the spiritual life has more to do with subtraction than with addition.
But in the capitalistic West, we keep climbing higher up the ladder of spiritual success, and we've turned the Gospel into a matter of addition instead of subtraction.
What we should do is get ourselves out of the way! Then God will be evident. Then we can easily welcome Christ.
We've taken ourselves so seriously, although we're only a tiny moment of consciousness.
As a person I'm just a tiny part of creation, a particle that reflects only a fragment of God's glory.
Richard Rohr, from Simplicity
When I think of the grief so many people suffer - myself included, over the years - feeling that we're not climbing up "the ladder of spiritual success", or that we have slipped back down from somewhere we had once achieved, it brings tears to my eyes. It's only as we do discover our failure to "achieve" spiritually, when we discover that the ladder is actually a snake, that we being to become people God can use, people who can receive the love he has for us, people he can transform and heal and redeem and bring into the Kingdom to "live and work to [his] praise and glory."
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven..."
3 comments:
This is a good reminder. It is so true that we tend to try to turn spirituality into an achievement.
Amen...
I loved this quote from Rohr.
It put me in mind of how differently God has been presented in the Western Empire culture over the last few hundred years. A god who is so insecure within himself, so insanely self-gratifying and self-serving that we have to scrabble and scramble and perform to reach him. I am so grateful that he has shown me he is not like that at all. There is so much freedom within His walls to be ourselves, wherever we are. He is not in a hurry.
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