Friesencold

This book I’m reading, Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr, is really turning my world upside down. These lines just earned 5 little stars in the margin on page 90:

“Life does not care what I like or don’t like. It doesn’t matter a bit. If we stay in the world of preference and choice, we keep ourselves as the reference point. As if it matters what color I like.”

Whoa, what am I supposed to do with that? There again is the focus on “I.”

I am really grateful to a God who lets me be a part of this mystery. He let me be born and as Rohr says earlier in the book, “God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another it means that God is choosing us now and now and now. We have nothing to attain or even learn.”

I think I am starting to see what life is asking of me, and that is to die. Die to everything I have ever known or exalted about myself. Death first, then life can come. Losing myself to find myself. And this isn’t pie-in-the-sky “feeling” stuff. This is lived out in the daily-ness of it all. This is me giving Bauer my attention when he calls for me to look at something – I can choose to really look or to pretend to look. This is me getting up to pick up Cash’s fork off the floor again when I’d rather TJ or Bauer get up and do it. This is me letting go and oh, how it might hurt to do so. But it is the hurting that will bring the healing.

Two more quotes from Rohr:

“What can’t happen if we live entirely within the small “I” is, quite simply, love. Love is almost not possible there….When we live out of ego, we impose our demands on reality. But when we live in God’s presence, we await reality’s demands on us.”

“The private self is clearly an illusion largely created by thinking. My life is not about me. I am about life!…Don’t take this private thing so seriously. The primary philosophical and spiritual problem in the West is the lie of individualism. Individualism makes church almost impossible. It makes community almost impossible. It makes compassion almost impossible.”

Wow – There is just so much here, now. And I am here, now. And God is here, now. And all of that is just about the most amazing thing ever.

That, and this: How did Richard Rohr come to see all of this, and not just to see it, but to write it in a way that I can feel it more deeply than I have felt most any other thing in life? The answer only makes God even more real and true.