Edgy excerpts from a few favorite posts by Father Richard Rohr:
"Maybe you've had the experience that it's not until someone dies that we ask the ultimate questions, and that's what we mean when we say Jesus had to die for us. It's not that He had to literally pay God some price ( . . . as if the Father is standing up there in heaven with a big bill saying, 'Until I get some blood, I'm not going to change my mind about the human race.'). That puts us in a terrible position in relation to God, and it can't be true. As if God could not forgive without payment . . . Quite simply, until someone dies, we don't ask the big questions. We don't understand in a new way. We don't break through. The only price that Jesus was paying was to the human soul, so that we could break through to what is real and healing."
and
"If you keep listening to the love, if you keep receiving the love, trusting the love . . . you start to experience wihtin yourself a sense of possibility. Whatever life is inviting you into, you have this sense that it is okay and, even better, that you can do it! . . . It's not just possibility . . . but permission. It is permission to be who you really are. It's not just gay people who have to come out of their closets. We're all in our closets . . . it is permission to be the "image and likeness of God" that you already are. . . . Ironically, it takes most of our life to find it and accept it."
and
"Another word to describe mystical moments is emancipation. If it isn't an experience of newfound freedom, I don't think it is an authentic God experience. God is always bigger than you imagined or expected or even hoped. When you see people going to church and becoming smaller instead of larger, you have every reason to question whether . . . (it) is opening them to an authentic God experience. (Authentic God experiences) will feel like a new freedom to love . . . You are participating in something larger than yourself . . ."
and, finally:
"All this striving and this need to perform, climb, and achieve becomes, on some very real level, unnecessary . . . I can stop all this overproduction and over-proving of myself. That's Western and American culture. It's not the Gospel at all. So many of us are performers and overachievers to some degree, and we think 'when we do that' we will finally be lovable. Even when we 'achieve' a good day of 'performing,' it will never be enough, because it is inherently self-advancing and therefore self-defeating." We might call it 'spiritual capitalism'."
"Maybe you've had the experience that it's not until someone dies that we ask the ultimate questions, and that's what we mean when we say Jesus had to die for us. It's not that He had to literally pay God some price ( . . . as if the Father is standing up there in heaven with a big bill saying, 'Until I get some blood, I'm not going to change my mind about the human race.'). That puts us in a terrible position in relation to God, and it can't be true. As if God could not forgive without payment . . . Quite simply, until someone dies, we don't ask the big questions. We don't understand in a new way. We don't break through. The only price that Jesus was paying was to the human soul, so that we could break through to what is real and healing."
and
"If you keep listening to the love, if you keep receiving the love, trusting the love . . . you start to experience wihtin yourself a sense of possibility. Whatever life is inviting you into, you have this sense that it is okay and, even better, that you can do it! . . . It's not just possibility . . . but permission. It is permission to be who you really are. It's not just gay people who have to come out of their closets. We're all in our closets . . . it is permission to be the "image and likeness of God" that you already are. . . . Ironically, it takes most of our life to find it and accept it."
and
"Another word to describe mystical moments is emancipation. If it isn't an experience of newfound freedom, I don't think it is an authentic God experience. God is always bigger than you imagined or expected or even hoped. When you see people going to church and becoming smaller instead of larger, you have every reason to question whether . . . (it) is opening them to an authentic God experience. (Authentic God experiences) will feel like a new freedom to love . . . You are participating in something larger than yourself . . ."
and, finally:
"All this striving and this need to perform, climb, and achieve becomes, on some very real level, unnecessary . . . I can stop all this overproduction and over-proving of myself. That's Western and American culture. It's not the Gospel at all. So many of us are performers and overachievers to some degree, and we think 'when we do that' we will finally be lovable. Even when we 'achieve' a good day of 'performing,' it will never be enough, because it is inherently self-advancing and therefore self-defeating." We might call it 'spiritual capitalism'."
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