The revelation from the cross and the Twelve Steps, however, believes that sin and failure are, in fact, the setting and opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender—and then the future will take care of itself. It is a mystery that makes sense to the soul and is entirely an “economy of grace,” which makes sense only to those who have experienced it. –‘Breathing Under Water’ Richard Rohr
God does not directly destroy evil, the way our heroic and dualistic minds would like to imagine. God is much wiser, wastes nothing, and includes everything. The God of the Bible is best known for transmuting and transforming our very evils into our own more perfect good. God uses our sins in our own favor! God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience. How could that not be good news for just about everybody?. –‘Breathing Under Water’ Richard Rohr
And to be fully honest, I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others. As Simeon told Mary, “A sword will pierce your heart, so that the secret thoughts of many will be laid bare” (Luke 2:35). –‘Breathing Under Water‘ Richard Rohr
Love is patient and kind;
Love is not jealous or boastful;
Love is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way;
Love is not irritable or resentful;
Love does not rejoice at wrong,
Love rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things,
Love believes all things,
Love hopes all things,
Love endures all things.
Love never ends;
As for prophecies, they will pass away;
As for tongues, they will cease;
As for knowledge, it will pass away.
For our knowledge is imperfect
And our prophecy is imperfect;
But when the perfect comes,
The imperfect will pass away.
When I was a child,
I spoke like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child;
When I became a man,
I gave up childish ways.
For now we see in a mirror dimly,
But then face to face.
Now I know in part;
Then I shall understand fully,
Even as I have been fully understood.
So faith, hope, love abide,
These three!
The greatest of these is love.
There is the sin of ingratitude, and taking other people’s devotion or self-sacrifice for granted as our due. There is a sort of isolation which is reserved gone mad: you may be kindly enough disposed inside yourself, but your manner is such that people hesitate a long time before appealing to you for help, because you give the impression that you will not want to be disturbed or put out. This is akin to the voice of the “incuriosity” of which Saint Thomas treats: and which implies a sort of mental stagnation as far as social life is concerned, a lack of zest and interest which is also a lack of charity and responsibility, and denotes a lost childhood–the soul grown old and stale. You cannot be living in love and piety if nothing outside yourself has interest for you. On the other hand there is the vice of curiosity, which is the wrong sort of desire for information. It may be wrong because it is proud you want to know all about people and things because it feeds your sense of power it may be wrong because it is dissipated, distracting you from more important things or because it is a form of trespassing, that ruthless inquisitiveness to which nothing is sacred–people sometimes need to be reminded that to read letters not addressed to them may well be a grave sin; it may be wrong because it is directed to scandal-mongering and gossip; it will be wrong if in any way it is the expression not of a loving interest in others lives but of an anti-social inability to mind one’s own business. You must preserve or recapture the childlike quality of concern for the family but always distinguish it from the insatiable flutter-pated inquisitiveness which can never bear to be unacquainted with whatever is going on, however unimportant or however private. –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’
Father Gerald Vann
How do you endure
O life, not living where you live,
and being brought near death
by the arrows you receive
from that which you conceive of your beloved.
St John of the Cross ‘The Spiritual Canticle’
In the midst of this purgation, God grants the soul brief illumination that draw her to seek the “Who” she loves behind every stammering. Must she die and be liberated from this earthly body to be with her Beloved? Or must she simply wait upon his bidding? Eager as she is for total immolation, the soul also knows that now is not the time to be freed from the body (Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?–Romans 7:24). She sighs out of love, not discouragement. Every touch slays her anew. How blessed she is, despite her frail form, not to break under the weight of this cross. –Susan Muto ‘Deep into the Thicket’
Speaking of marriage, Jesus refers us to yet another page of Genesis, which, in its second chapter, paints a splendid and detailed portrait of the couple. First, we see the man, who anxiously seeks “a helper fit for him” capable of alleviating the solitude which he feels amid the animals and the world around him. The original Hebrew suggests a direct encounter, face to face, eye to eye, in a kind of silent dialogue, for where love is concerned, silence is always more eloquent than words. It is an encounter with a face, a “thou”, who reflects God’s own love and is man’s “best possession, a helper fit for him and a pillar of support”, in the words of the biblical sage (Sir 36:24). Or again, as the woman of the Song of Solomon will sing in a magnificent profession of love and mutual self-bestowal: “My beloved is mine and his… I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”. –-Pope Francis Amoris Laetitia
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