So, I read this and it made me laugh out loud:
"When you cannot enjoy the lilies of the field or the sparrows in the sky, don’t waste time thinking you can enjoy God. Start at the bottom; try to love a rock."
-Richard Rohr, Adapted from Contemplation in Action, pp. 83-84
Oh my. That so speaks to me, but I can't seem to articulate why. It just made my morning a whole lot brighter. He goes on to say this:
"Otherwise, we end up trying to be spiritual before we have learned how to be human! It is a major problem. Maybe this is why Jesus came to model humanity for us—much more than divinity. Once we get the human part down, “stop slamming doors” and start loving rocks, God will most assuredly take it all from there. Get the ordinary human thing down, and you will have all the spirituality that you can handle."
I love noticing how often Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of Man. It causes my heart to crack in a pleasurable way, how often and how persistently He points out His human nature.
It's just astonishing to me; that my God took on my own nature. He became like me! God did that!
What an astonishing God that is. What humility and tenderness that demonstrates about Him. There is no barrier He did not cross over, or dissolve, in order to be fully with us, and us in Him.
It is interesting to notice that His greatest victory came through helplessness. He didn't achieve it by might, by right, by power. He achieved it through nakedness, humiliation, suffering and surrender.
It was in this way that He conquered the darkness, making an open show of them, and led captivity captive.
He could have smashed everything to bits. He could have brought the whole show tumbling down to pieces but that wasn't His gospel. That wasn't His message of victory.
A person could meditate for a long time on what that says about God- how extraordinary His plans are, how supremely confident He is.
Evil can lay God in the grave, and still not win any ground. God can die as a man on a cross, and by it, drawn the world to Himself.
I myself resist being human; I thought I was supposed to be a saint.
My ego heartily agrees with this assessment. My ego has an endless hunger for significance of any kind- my ego wants the "value-add," and sainthood is such a pretty badge to win. The robes are just so fetching.
I've always been this way. I'm going back and writing through my childhood, and let me tell you, I had the lean, hungry heart of a Viking.
Grace was a cheap commodity. I was determined, with every fierce fibre of my being, to do all my business only in the cold weight of gold.
There was no weak, unacceptable part of myself that I would not slaughter in pursuit of this perfection; I didn't realize that a second sacrifice was unnecessary.
Even now, I prefer to keep myself captive. I don't know how to stop going to war with myself.
Even when my Captain comes to me with open hands and pleads with me to put the sword down already, that He won the battle for me, I can't believe Him. I look at Him with my shell shocked eyes and shake my head.
I will go to war for Him, but I have real trouble surrendering to Him. When He takes me in His arms and starts to bind up my wounds, I don't understand what He is doing. I thought I was supposed to bleed.
It's clear what I must do- I must start loving me some rocks.
