We looked too long for God and truth through words alone. The fruit for humanity has been rather limited, it seems to me - especially when I observe every day the extraordinary amount of unhappy and angry people in well educated and 'religious' countries.
Interpretation
The quest for truth and spirituality shouldn't rely solely on words, as it often leads to dissatisfaction.
Richard Rohr suggests that merely seeking God and truth through verbal communication and intellectual understanding is inadequate. This limitation has resulted in an excess of unhappy and angry individuals, even within well-educated and 'religious' societies, indicating that deeper, experiential connections are necessary for genuine fulfillment.
In practice
During a lecture on spirituality, this quote can be used to stress the importance of experiential knowledge.
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.
Religious leaders will always avail themselves of public ignorance for their own purpose.
Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them?
A comfortable, convenient life is not a real life - the more comfortable, the less alive. The most comfortable life is in the grave.
All neurotics seek the religious
I'm alive. When I'm eating that's all I think about. If I'm on the march, I just concentrate on marching. If I have to fight,it will be just as good a day as any to die. If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life is the moment we are living now.
In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.