2
" Good powerlessness (because there is also a bad powerlessness) allows you to “fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). You stop holding yourself up, so you can be held. There, wonderfully, you are not in control and only God needs to be right. That is always the very special space of any positive powerlessness and vulnerability, but it is admittedly rare.
Faith can only happen in this very special threshold space. You don’t really do faith, it happens to you when you give up control and all the steering of your ship. Frankly, we often do it when we have no other choice. Faith hardly ever happens when we rush to judgment or seek too-quick resolution of anything. Thus you see why faith will invariably be a minority and suspect position. And you also see why the saints always said that faith is a gift. You fall into it more than ever fully choosing it, and only then do you know how grace, love, and God can sustain you and strengthen you at very deep levels. "
― Richard Rohr , Yes, and...: Daily Meditations
5
" Much of what we find in the eyes of Jesus must first have been in the eyes of Mary. The mother’s vision is powerfully communicated to her children. Mary had to be his first spiritual director, the one who humanly gave a life vision to Jesus, who taught Jesus how to believe and how to feel his feelings. What was in Jesus’s eyes was somehow first in hers. (We now know this to be true scientifically from our new understanding of mirror neurons.) In both of their eyes was what they both believed about God, and it was a co-believing! The Eternal Feminine holds us naked at each end of life: The Madonna first brings us into life and then the grief-stricken mother of the Pietá hands us over to death. She expands our capacity to feel, to enter the compassion and the pain of being human. She holds joy deeply, where death cannot get to it. Jesus learns by watching her and he protects her motherhood in some of his very last words from the cross (John 19:26–27), just as she protected his sonship. Not a word is spoken by Mary in either place, at his birth or at his death. Did you ever think about that? Mary simply trusts and experiences deeply. She is simply and fully present. Faith is not, first of all, for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through! +Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, pp. 153–154. "
― Richard Rohr , Yes, and...: Daily Meditations
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" Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, nonviolent, shared, and loving. However, we made it into an established religion (and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself. We could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain throughout most of Christian history and still believe that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior or continue, in good standing, to receive the sacraments. The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great. "
― Richard Rohr , Yes, and...: Daily Meditations
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" In recent years and elections, we might have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of authentic Christianity. Where did this come from? They never were the criteria of proper membership for the first two thousand years. Instead, they reflect very recent culture wars, largely from people who think of themselves as traditionalists! (The fundamentals were already resolved in the early Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. Note that none of the core beliefs is about morality at all. The creeds are more mystical, cosmological, and about aligning our lives inside of a huge, sacred story.) When we lose the great, mystical level of religion, we always become moralistic about this or that as a cheap substitute. It gives us a false sense of being on higher spiritual ground than others. "
― Richard Rohr , Yes, and...: Daily Meditations
