I want to see…

We must never presume that we see. We must always be ready to see anew. But it's so hard to go back, to be vulnerable, and to say to your soul, "I don't know anything."

Try to say that: "I don't know anything."

Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know.

We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see…"

Spirituality is about seeing. It's not about earning or achieving. It's about relationship rather than results or requirements.

Once you see, the rest follows.

You don't need to push the river, because you are in it. The life is lived within us, and we learn how to say yes to that life.

If we exist on a level where we can see how "everything belongs," we can trust the flow and trust the life, the life so large and deep and spacious that it even includes its opposite, death.

Richard Rohr, from Everything Belongs

I think being on the edge is like this. Everything we truly are we already are, and yet the spiritual life is a life of becoming. The thing is, it's a life of becoming who we actually are, and that's not the way that culture, our Western culture especially, sees it. We are brought up to believe it all comes down to the bottom line, to earning and achieving, results and requirements. If we live out this "life so large and deep and spacious", we become incredibly threatening to the society of earning and achieving, results and requirements, and we will be driven out onto the edge, if we're not there already.

I don't want anyone to feel, though, that I'm saying this with any sense of a chip on my shoulder, or of being hardly done by. It's fine out on the edge, truly. It's only society that represents it to us as nasty out on the edge. Jesus, Francis, Clare and Cuthbert are better company than most bankers and stockbrokers, and a good deal more reliable, too. I like it out on the edge. The air off the sea is clean, and if I'm going to belong anywhere, I belong there.