DONT TALK BECAUSE YOU CAN
11/11/24 15:03
We can take a long time to accumulate wisdom if we never stop talking. The ability to listen as a habit opens us to new ideas and more life. Don’t imprison yourself in your own ideas. We are not compelled to live in inherited bubbles of illusion when the nature of truth is that it can unfold before our eyes..
Humility is the Door to wisdom and wisdom is a hallway to life. Prejudice is like the blinkers that horses wear. Blinkers are made for horses as beasts of burden. An open heart opens us to God and His unlimited life. The worst addiction is the addiction to our own ideas. It likens us o a fish in a goldfish bowl who thinks this bowl is the real world. Why live from ides that are the opiate of a community when there is a simple gospel available to all that is infinite life?
AN ALIVE SPIRIT
If our mind-set is bent our view of all else will be crooked. This is the effect of a legalised gospel.
Listening well enriches us as a person. Liberated from stale ideas we become seekers of life – fellow travellers who want all of Jesus Christ and not the teaspoon amount we have been served up. They have a structure in which they live that is the self in the Being of God. They share themselves and their adventure in Christ and they listen to yours, rejoicing in new insights gained and new escapes from misguided orthodoxies. I mean the release from the milieu of un-life from which Jesus came to set captives free.
HE SHARED LIFE
In the introduction to ‘Following Jesus’ Richard Rohr writes of Henry Nouwen – a stream of ‘living water’ person who unconsciously gives out life because He has found THE LIFE in which to live. “Because I looked up to him as a wise and holy elder, I would often try to get some free spiritual direction out of him. Only a few minutes into it, I’d realize that he never really answered my questions, but had somehow turned it around to make me into his spiritual director! I was never sure if it was humility on his part or some kind of unconscious need for reciprocity, but I finally concluded that it was a totally sincere spiritual search and he valued my insights as much as his own. As much as I knew that he was a spiritual writer, in real life he was a spiritual seeker and believer.” (1) This is the living way to break out of the bubble of stagnation that warps our religion.
THE QUEST FOR FRESH BREAD
Not everyone is alive. We never will be in religion. Our spirit comes alive as a result of direct union with Jesus. This union is ours when not smothered by the law and religion. Richard Rohr is telling of a person who is living water because He has made it his life work to seek life no matter what boundaries he must cross to bathe in the River of Life. This is not a person who makes do with last week’s milk or the flat soft drink or inherited beliefs. He seeks life for itself.
LIFE THAT IS THE LIGHT
Life is not contained in an ideology. It is not the possession of right or left. It’s not the possession of nice people because they are nice. Ignorance of life is ignorance no matter who has it. Life cannot be hemmed in by religion and there is not much of it in fundamentalism.
Life is not words but THE WORD who is the logos who is the Reality that Paul calls The Law of the Spirit of Life. This is not an abstraction. It relates to us as Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is the expression of life itself – the Door to the trinity that is God. The trinity is love, life and truth manifest as God. This is the hub of the universe. Living in the inclusion in God that we have been given is the issue of life. Never the law or a culture of moralism. Why? Because a Christ-life is not a Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil. It is Christ who is our life.
When Jesus is our life we will possess this life as our own. We will be open to truth, discern folly and be intolerant of lies that suffocate love, belonging and unlimited life. Our aim will never be to perpetrate inherited prejudices or ignorance just because they are ours and we prefer to be a goldfish instead of a person. But our life is to join Jesus to multiply His life without limit.
(1)Excerpt From: Henri J. M. Nouwen. “Following Jesus.” Apple Books.
Humility is the Door to wisdom and wisdom is a hallway to life. Prejudice is like the blinkers that horses wear. Blinkers are made for horses as beasts of burden. An open heart opens us to God and His unlimited life. The worst addiction is the addiction to our own ideas. It likens us o a fish in a goldfish bowl who thinks this bowl is the real world. Why live from ides that are the opiate of a community when there is a simple gospel available to all that is infinite life?
AN ALIVE SPIRIT
If our mind-set is bent our view of all else will be crooked. This is the effect of a legalised gospel.
Listening well enriches us as a person. Liberated from stale ideas we become seekers of life – fellow travellers who want all of Jesus Christ and not the teaspoon amount we have been served up. They have a structure in which they live that is the self in the Being of God. They share themselves and their adventure in Christ and they listen to yours, rejoicing in new insights gained and new escapes from misguided orthodoxies. I mean the release from the milieu of un-life from which Jesus came to set captives free.
HE SHARED LIFE
In the introduction to ‘Following Jesus’ Richard Rohr writes of Henry Nouwen – a stream of ‘living water’ person who unconsciously gives out life because He has found THE LIFE in which to live. “Because I looked up to him as a wise and holy elder, I would often try to get some free spiritual direction out of him. Only a few minutes into it, I’d realize that he never really answered my questions, but had somehow turned it around to make me into his spiritual director! I was never sure if it was humility on his part or some kind of unconscious need for reciprocity, but I finally concluded that it was a totally sincere spiritual search and he valued my insights as much as his own. As much as I knew that he was a spiritual writer, in real life he was a spiritual seeker and believer.” (1) This is the living way to break out of the bubble of stagnation that warps our religion.
THE QUEST FOR FRESH BREAD
Not everyone is alive. We never will be in religion. Our spirit comes alive as a result of direct union with Jesus. This union is ours when not smothered by the law and religion. Richard Rohr is telling of a person who is living water because He has made it his life work to seek life no matter what boundaries he must cross to bathe in the River of Life. This is not a person who makes do with last week’s milk or the flat soft drink or inherited beliefs. He seeks life for itself.
LIFE THAT IS THE LIGHT
Life is not contained in an ideology. It is not the possession of right or left. It’s not the possession of nice people because they are nice. Ignorance of life is ignorance no matter who has it. Life cannot be hemmed in by religion and there is not much of it in fundamentalism.
Life is not words but THE WORD who is the logos who is the Reality that Paul calls The Law of the Spirit of Life. This is not an abstraction. It relates to us as Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is the expression of life itself – the Door to the trinity that is God. The trinity is love, life and truth manifest as God. This is the hub of the universe. Living in the inclusion in God that we have been given is the issue of life. Never the law or a culture of moralism. Why? Because a Christ-life is not a Christian version of the knowledge of good and evil. It is Christ who is our life.
When Jesus is our life we will possess this life as our own. We will be open to truth, discern folly and be intolerant of lies that suffocate love, belonging and unlimited life. Our aim will never be to perpetrate inherited prejudices or ignorance just because they are ours and we prefer to be a goldfish instead of a person. But our life is to join Jesus to multiply His life without limit.
(1)Excerpt From: Henri J. M. Nouwen. “Following Jesus.” Apple Books.
