Poor and ordinary…

We must always try to return to the level of our being where we simply “are”, where we’re naked, and where we experience how “good” we are in God, because of God, and in spite of our own limitations.

When we “know God in ourselves and ourselves in God”, as Teresa of Avila advised, we have the freedom to be poor and ordinary. We don’t have to prove anything, we don’t have to defend anything, and we return from this place to the world with greater and enduring strength. And with this strength we’re flung back into the world unafraid.

Richard Rohr, from Simplicity, pp. 96, 97

This is how I long to live, really, now. “The freedom to be poor and ordinary”—it is the truth of our poverty and ordinariness that sets us free. It’s what Jesus spoke of in the Beatitudes (Matthew 4.23-5.8) as the source of our blessing in him. Only when we admit our emptiness and our woundedness can we be filled, healed, even lifted up in his arms to the face of Christ…

God has grown used to our small and cowardly ways of waiting behind closed doors (John 20:19). God knows that we settle for easy certitudes and unsought answers instead of real inner experience. Yet God is determined to break through and lead us deeper.

The Spirit eventually overcomes the obstacles that we present and surrounds us with enough peace so that we can face the “wounds in his hands and his side” (John 20:27)—and then our own inner wounds too. They are finally the same journey. St. Augustine said “In my deepest wound I saw your glory—and it dazzled me!”

Rohr again, adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 192- 193, day 205