The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The struggle between faith and the acceptance of uncertainty reveals deeper complexities in both science and religion.
This quote highlights the tension between scientific inquiry, which embraces uncertainty and speculation through hypotheses, and the desires of religious individuals for definitive answers and absolute truths. Richard Rohr points out the irony that, while many consider themselves people of faith, the concept of faith itself has evolved to represent a discomfort with ambiguity, contradicting its original meaning, which often involves trusting in the unknown and the yet-to-be-discovered.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the relationship between faith and science, this quote could provide a thought-provoking perspective.
More from Richard Rohr
All quotes →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.
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The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.
We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.
I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.
I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.
But what force in the galaxy is stronger than she is?" "Indifference." Jerusha surprised herself with the answer. "Indifference, Gundhalinu, is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it. It lets neglect and decay and monstrous injustice go unchecked. It doesn't act, it allows. And that's what gives it so much power.
No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.