All you can do is abide in God, and then God holds the tensions in you and through you and with you—and largely in spite of you!
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Paradox"
"The Stable Witness"
Wednesday, 30 July 2014
In the process of transformation, you need to find an objective position detached from your egoic self and from the event or paradox that might be causing you conflict. Unless you find and learn to abide in the place of the “Stable Witness,” which is the Holy Spirit who has been given to each of us (see Romans 8:16), you will remain trapped in the ever changing ego, which could be called the unobserved mind. From the place of the Stable Witness, however, you can observe both yourself and the conflicting circumstance with objective, calm, loving eyes. You can see yourself doing your compulsive little dance, but now you don’t judge yourself and you don’t hate yourself for it. Quite simply, you are not so identified with that small self because you are resting in the Big Self, in the God Self, in the One who knows all, loves all, and holds all things in their seeming imperfection.
Like the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, holding the opposites is the unique work of the Spirit. It is not something you can merely attain by practice, although that is necessary too. All you can do is abide in God, and then God holds the tensions in you and through you and with you—and largely in spite of you! Such a way of living is a participation in the very life of God, who holds all things in unity and compassion.
To hold questions seriously is much more a source of spiritual wisdom than to have quick and easy certitudes. The ego and the mind want to rush to judgment. What the mystics and the true spiritual directors teach is how to negotiate that darkness, how to wait it out, how to hold on. Remember what Mark Twain said: “It is not what you don’t know that harms you, it is what you know for certain—and it just ain’t true!”
I’m convinced that the only absolute the Bible offers us is God, not an institution, not an intellectual or moral belief system (which I believe we often try to substitute for authentic God experience). We need to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrew 10:31). We need the kind of certitude that comes from giving ourselves to the mystery, to the Compassionate Abyss, which then itself becomes the new foundation. It’s a trusting in One who is holding it all together, which we cannot do alone or apart.
Adapted from Holding the Tension: The Power of Paradox, discs 1 and 3 (CD, MP3 download)
Gateway to Silence: Abide in the One who holds everything together.
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