At the edge...

I am already forgetting the only thing that the silence has taught me: our lives are usable for God. We need not be effective, but only transparent and vulnerable.

God takes it all from there, and there is not much point in comparing who is better, right, higher or lower, or supposedly saved. We are all partial images slowly coming into focus, to the degree we allow and filter the Light and Love of God.

Richard Rohr, from Contemplation in Action

Those at the edge, ironically, always hold the secret for the conversion of every age and culture. They always hold the projected and denied parts of our soul.

Only as the People of God receive the stranger and the leper, those who don't play our game, do we discover not only the hidden and hated parts of our own souls, but the Lord Jesus himself.

In letting go, we make room for the Other. The Church is always converted when the outcasts are re-invited into the temple.

Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations 

As those who follow Christ, who was crucified outside the city wall, we are called always to question, by our very existence, the culture into which we have been born, or which our occupations have led us. We cannot allow ourselves to become comfortable - respectable members of a status quo supported by law, custom and wealth. But, and it is a big but, we are not called to be revolutionaries as the world understands revolution, still less terrorists, however we may have sometimes to preach terrible messages, as John the Baptist did.

"We need not be effective, but only transparent and vulnerable." Always we must remember this, for here is the secret both to the humility without which God cannot achieve anything in or through us. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux said, "No spiritual house can stand for a moment except on the foundation of humility." As Christians, we are not called to do great things for God. God has called us to allow him to do great things with us, in us, through us, around us: the glory is his, since it is he who does all that is good.