The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the idea that true understanding of the divine can come from deep, contemplative experiences rather than superficial perceptions.
Richard Rohr's quote suggests that the experience of darkness or suffering can be a transformative gift that leads individuals to a deeper awareness of God's presence. It implies that intellect and sensory experiences are limited in grasping the divine, and it is often in moments of struggle or desolation that one can truly encounter and understand a profound spiritual reality.
In practice
This quote can be used during a spiritual retreat to help participants reflect on their experiences of suffering.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.
We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.
Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.
I don't want to be immortal through my works. I want to be immortal by not dying.
Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgement, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is PRIDE, the never-failing vice of fools.
As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.
The behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.