Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens.
Interpretation
Preparing your heart through spiritual practices allows you to face difficult times with an open heart.
This quote by Richard Rohr emphasizes the importance of cultivating a strong and open heart through faith, prayer, grace, mercy, love, and forgiveness. It suggests that by preparing ourselves spiritually, we can better navigate life's challenges, allowing us to maintain compassion and openness even during our most trying times.
In practice
A motivational speaker could use this quote to inspire resilience in their audience.
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.
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
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.
Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.
The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille
Our real journey in life is interior.
Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
We dont know anything about racism. Weve never experienced it. If words can make a difference in your life for seven minutes, how would it affect you if you heard this every day of your life?
What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do in our leisure hours determines what we are.
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