Center for Action and Contemplation – Father Richard Rohr’s Daily
Meditation – Monday, 3 February 2014 “Stage Five: My shadow self is who I am”
“Levels of Spiritual Development (Part Two)”
“Stage Five: My shadow self is who I am”
Monday, February 3, 2014
At Stage Five, my shadow self is who I am. This is not an easy
time, and thus most avoid it. This is what John of the Cross called “the Night
of the Senses.” Here you meet yourself in your raw, unvarnished, uncivilized
state, and you start dealing very realistically with your own shadow self,
phoniness, mixed motives, and actual unlovingness.
As a young man I thought I had become a Franciscan and a priest
to teach and talk about love, that I had left everything to love God and
neighbor. But by my forties and fifties I had to be honest and say, “Richard,
have you ever really loved anybody more than yourself? Is there anybody in
particular that you would die for?” My celibacy was based on the utterly false
premise that if I did not love anybody in particular, I would automatically
love God more. I realized that that was not at all true. All I did was love
myself more, but in a very well-disguised form. Much of that middle period of
my life I spent shadowboxing, seeing my own inability to believe and to
practice the very things I was teaching to others. And this continues!
The work of Stage Five can go on for quite a long time, and if
you do not have someone loving you during that period, believing in you,
holding on to you—if you do not meet the unconditional love of God, if you do
not encounter the radical sense of grace that touches your unconscious
level—the spiritual journey will not continue. You have to experience God’s
grace as unearned favor, unearned gratuity, or you will surely regress.
In Stage Five, more than any other stage, you learn to live with
contradiction and ambiguity. This is true non-dual, or unitive, thinking. Stage
Five allows you to find God in what John of the Cross calls “luminous
darkness.” It is a real darkness, but somehow inside of the darkness, you find
light—a much truer, kinder, and softer light. Mostly, you learn patience.
Adapted from The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of St.
Francis, disc 5 (CD)
Gateway to Silence: Open me to wholeness
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