Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Heaven"
"The Search for the Real"
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
---
"Heaven"
"The Search for the Real"
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
---
We are created with an inner restlessness that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or no-t. There is a God-sized hole waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that finally only divine grace and love can satisfy.
We dare not try to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The root of evil is much more selfishness, superficiality, and ignorance than the usually listed “hot sins.” God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures.
If we go to the depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, “real,” and with a timeless quality to it. We will move from “belief” to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if we have ever loved truly, accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, or stood in awe before mystery, time, or beauty.
This “something real” is what all the world religions point to when they speak of heaven, nirvana, bliss, or enlightenment. Our mistake has been delaying that inner state until after death. If heaven is later, that’s because it is first of all now. When we die before we die, we are surrendering to the Real, to our union with God ahead of time. Why wait? If God loves us now, why not later too?
Experiences of the Real here on earth are the pledge, guarantee, hint, and promise of an eternal something. Once we touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the Real, has to be forever. Call it wishful thinking, if you will, but this insistence has been a recurring intuition since the beginnings of humanity. Jesus promised the Samaritan woman that “the spring within you will well up unto eternal life” (John 4:14). In other words, heaven/union/love emerges from deep wellsprings within us, which can only imply it is already there. Why, since that is true, does most organized religion keep us concentrating on external “holy” things outside the self? The primary sacrament is the soul itself (I have the courage and authority to speak this way from experts like Augustine, all the Teresas, John of the Cross, and any mystic worthy of the name.)
Our task is simply to embody heaven now. We cannot “get there”; we can only “be there”—which ironically is to “be here!” Love, like prayer, is not so much an action that we do, but a reality that we are. We don’t decide to be loving. Love is our True Self. It is where we came from and where we’re going. All spiritual growth is no more than a matter of becoming who we already are.
We are created with an inner restlessness that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or no-t. There is a God-sized hole waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that finally only divine grace and love can satisfy.
We dare not try to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The root of evil is much more selfishness, superficiality, and ignorance than the usually listed “hot sins.” God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures.
If we go to the depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, “real,” and with a timeless quality to it. We will move from “belief” to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if we have ever loved truly, accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, or stood in awe before mystery, time, or beauty.
This “something real” is what all the world religions point to when they speak of heaven, nirvana, bliss, or enlightenment. Our mistake has been delaying that inner state until after death. If heaven is later, that’s because it is first of all now. When we die before we die, we are surrendering to the Real, to our union with God ahead of time. Why wait? If God loves us now, why not later too?
Experiences of the Real here on earth are the pledge, guarantee, hint, and promise of an eternal something. Once we touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the Real, has to be forever. Call it wishful thinking, if you will, but this insistence has been a recurring intuition since the beginnings of humanity. Jesus promised the Samaritan woman that “the spring within you will well up unto eternal life” (John 4:14). In other words, heaven/union/love emerges from deep wellsprings within us, which can only imply it is already there. Why, since that is true, does most organized religion keep us concentrating on external “holy” things outside the self? The primary sacrament is the soul itself (I have the courage and authority to speak this way from experts like Augustine, all the Teresas, John of the Cross, and any mystic worthy of the name.)
Our task is simply to embody heaven now. We cannot “get there”; we can only “be there”—which ironically is to “be here!” Love, like prayer, is not so much an action that we do, but a reality that we are. We don’t decide to be loving. Love is our True Self. It is where we came from and where we’re going. All spiritual growth is no more than a matter of becoming who we already are.
Gateway to Silence: Going home to Love
---
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016), 193;Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Live (Jossey-Bass: 2011), 94-96;
Just This (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017), 90.
---
---
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016), 193;Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Live (Jossey-Bass: 2011), 94-96;
Just This (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017), 90.
---
An Advent Meditation
Cynthia Bourgeault, a CAC core faculty member, reflects on Mary—the mother of Jesus, “the mother of contemplatives”—as a model for co-creating wholeness in the world.
Watch Cynthia’s short video at cac.org/faculty-advent-messages.
---
The Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Tuesday, 19 December 2017 "Richard Rohr Meditation: Returning to Union"
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Heaven"
"Returning to Union"
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
---
"Heaven"
"Returning to Union"
Tuesday, December 19, 2017
---
A familiar—and apparently true—story of a newborn baby’s homecoming illustrates the implanted memory of union or heaven. A newborn’s precocious four-year old sibling tells her parents, “I want to talk to my new little brother alone.” The parents put their ears to the nursery door and hear the little girl saying to her baby brother, “Quick, tell me who made you. Tell me where you came from. I’m beginning to forget!”
The baby represents the “little ones” Jesus praises, the innocent children and mystics who know their belovedness and union with God. The four-year-old represents most of us, caught in between knowing and forgetting and wanting to know again! In the complexity of life’s journey, we all begin to forget. It grows harder and harder to remember our original identity in God. Many of us experience a crisis of meaning and hope that keeps us scrambling for external power, perks, and possessions, trying to fill the void.
I am saddened that much of Christian history has had so little inner experience to trust that divine union could really be true for us—already and now. Once we know there is an original implanted and positive direction to our existence, we can trust the primary flow (faith); eventually we will learn to calmly rest there (hope); and we can actually become a conduit (love). Finally, we are at home both here and forever. What else could salvation be? Remember, “There are only three things that last: faith, hope, and love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Going to heaven is not the goal of religion. Salvation isn’t an evacuation plan or a reward for the next world. Whenever we live in conscious, loving union with God, which is eventually to love everything, we are saved. This can and should happen now in this world. Social justice advocate Dorothy Day (1897-1980) credited Catherine of Siena’s inspiration for her often-shared words: “All the way to Heaven is heaven, because He said, ‘I am the Way.’” [1] Even Pope John Paul II said that heaven and hell are not geographic places but states of consciousness. [2] When we understand this, we will spend our lives trying to bring about the Lord’s Prayer: Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
In a sense, the Christ is always too much for us. He’s always “going ahead of us into Galilee” (Matthew 28:7). The Risen Christ is leading us into a future for which we’re never fully ready. How can we even imagine divine union? It is too big a concept for most of us. “These are the things that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, things beyond the mind of humanity—what God has prepared for those who love” (1 Corinthians 2:9).
Gateway to Silence: Going home to Love
---
References:
[1] Dorothy Day, letter to Charles Butterworth, June 10, 1959. See All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Marquette University Press: 2010), 254.
[2] Pope John Paul II, General Audiences on July 21, 1999 (heaven) and July 28, 1999 (hell). The Vatican offers access to a wide collection of papal addresses and documents at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/index.htm.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of St. Francis, disc 3 (Sounds True: 2010), CD;
Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013), 90; and
Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2007), 208-209, 213-214.---
---
References:
[1] Dorothy Day, letter to Charles Butterworth, June 10, 1959. See All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Marquette University Press: 2010), 254.
[2] Pope John Paul II, General Audiences on July 21, 1999 (heaven) and July 28, 1999 (hell). The Vatican offers access to a wide collection of papal addresses and documents at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/index.htm.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of St. Francis, disc 3 (Sounds True: 2010), CD;
Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013), 90; and
Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2007), 208-209, 213-214.---
A Spring Within Us
A book of Richard Rohr’s meditations—one for each day of the year—to help us rediscover our inherent belovedness and navigate the lifelong journey back to our Source
Order at store.cac.org.
---
Copyright © 2017
The Center for Action and Contemplation
PO Box 12464 (mailing)
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87195, United States
---
No comments:
Post a Comment