Friday, January 29, 2010

Falling through...

Brothers and sisters, remember that your life situation will not last. It is only that which you fall through so that you can fall into your actual Life, and that Big Life ironically includes death (which is the falling). For Paul the word for that Life Force field is "Christ." Yes it is personified and summed up in Jesus, but he also says it is everywhere and always available to all who "fall through" (read "are transformed").

Everybody takes their present life's situation as if it is their one and only life. It is not! So wait for those moments when you fall through your life's situations into your real life, which is Christ, or Christ Consciousness (1 Corinthians 2:16), if you prefer. What you are doing in prayer is consciously choosing to let go of your grasping mind and its identification with passing life situations so that you can fall into your Real Life which is always much bigger and better than you, and shared by all. It is the Eternal Life of Christ.

Richard Rohr, from The Great Themes of Paul

Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience... For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
Colossians 3:12,3

How I need to keep these words before me in these days!  The weaker I am myself, in this strange anchorless between time, the more clearly I hear, like Paul, God saying "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." (1 Corinthians 12:9)

I should apologise for the infrequency of my posts here, and my still greater infrequency in commenting on others' blogs. I am still here, still alive and online, and I do read something of what the rest of the blogosphere has to say. But it's not always so easy at the moment to avoid being a little taciturn, or, as Ronnie Barker would have said in Porridge, being a charmless nerk...

2 comments:

Sue said...

A charmless nerk, eh? I can relate to that. Funny how even your comments about your charmlessness have a certain charm about them, Mike :)

I so love what Ricky Rohr says here about prayer "consciously choosing to let go of your grasping mind and its identification with passing life situations so that you can fall into your Real Life ..."

Yes and yes and yes and yes and yes. Thanks for the reminder; I seem to be needing it every, like, 3 1/2 seconds in my own weird between time.

Life is weird!!! :)

Sue said...

PS: The falling through does feel like death. I don't know if I will ever quite get used to that :)