Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody.
Interpretation
The perspective of individuals shapes their reality, affecting how they interact with the world and others.
This quote by Richard Rohr emphasizes the idea that one's mindset significantly influences their perception of reality. Wholeness, representing unity and completeness, is perceived and fostered by those who feel whole within themselves, while those who feel fragmented often project their inner struggles onto their surroundings, creating division and discord in their interactions with others.
In practice
In a motivational speech about teamwork, emphasizing unity, one might use this quote to encourage collective harmony.
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.
I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.
To be able to function in late capitalism without being a psychological wreck, it is necessary to accept the insane as standard.
Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
A dispassionate white sun shone at the summit of the sky. I wanted to hone myself on it till I grew saintly and thin and essential as the blade of a knife.
Of course, errors are not good for a chess game, but errors are unavoidable and in any case, a game without ant errors, or as they say 'flawless game' is colorless.
I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.
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