Richard Rohr

It was a week ago Andrea, Michelle, Peter and myself got to hear Father Richard Rohr a Franciscan Preist from New Mexico ... Part of my Easter day ended at a coffee shop stealing some of Richard's words and thinking about how they fit with my own thinking. What follows are some rather random thoughts...

It is when we are on the edge of life; in the midst of the great joys and great sorrows that I am most aware of God. Strange that it is in the deepest drama of life itself that I most sense a genuine prayer. It is less about the examples, the classes, the retreats, the books, the various practices, all of which must have helped shape me and given meaning to prayer, I am sure. All of which I have used thinking I will be more centered, which I have assumed meant being closer to God. Could it be that it is when I am furthest away from center in these great joys, great sorrows, most troubled, when I am most unbalanced, that I am also most awake, that I am most attentive to God’s being. Being is prayer.

God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good. Thus it is not earned. It is only lived in. At it’s best religion is doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God. Even this is not a demand it is only a response out of unfathomable appreciation for something I cannot fully understand. In gratefulness I become more and more passionate in my wanting to share.

This goes so against most religion that worries more about who is in or who is out, who is right or left, who is up who is down, gay or straight, born again or born again and again and again, who can have communion or who can’t, if the music should be by Johann Sebastian Bach or Michael W. Smith, oh my, who should throw the first stone! Trying to keep religion pure, trying to do it right must be a very exhausting and defeating.

It is not about protection… it is about proclamation. I can only share what I have learned, experienced, wonder, and sense as I continue to discover this loving, graceful God, who I must admit, I only get glimpses of. I proclaim and share a faith that becomes more and more a mystery. As I continue to learn I know I know something, but that is only enough to know I know very, very little. Accepting mystery, accepting multiplicity, drops all need to defend or be defensive when I hear or see things not of my experience, understanding or even belief. --- Still, I confess a desire to prove you, whoever disagrees with me, wrong. I have to protect my belief that protection is not important. – Ouch! – So I continue to learn to listen, love, experience, value relationship, grow in my passions, be still, and learn to let God be God.