Fwd: Richard Rohr's Meditation: Suffering Can Bring Us to God
Gabby Dean
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From: Center for Action and Contemplation <no-r...@cac.org>
Date: 9 April 2014 2:19:00 PM AWST
To: gabby...@westnet.com.au
Subject: Richard Rohr's Meditation: Suffering Can Bring Us to God
Reply-To: no-r...@cac.org
Suffering is the only thing strong enough to destabilize the imperial ego.
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St. Francis Embracing the Leper (detail) by Lawrence Zink, reprinted from Francis, The Journey and the Dream,
© 1988, Murray Bodo, OFM, St. Anthony Messenger (Franciscan Media), p. 13. Used with permission.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Transformative Suffering
Suffering Can Bring Us to God
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he reveals that God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound you, but in fact to bring you to God. So there are no dead ends. Everything can be transmuted and everything can be used.
After all, on the cross, God took the worst thing, the killing of God, and made it into the best thing—the redemption of the world! If you gaze upon the mystery of the cross long enough, your dualistic mind breaks down, and you become slow to call things totally good or totally bad. You realize that God uses the bad for good, and that many people who call themselves good may in fact not be so good. At the cross you learn humility, patience, compassion, and all of the Christian virtues that really matter.
Jesus says, “There’s only one sign I’m going to give you: the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Luke 11:29, Matthew 12:39, 16:4). Sooner or later, life is going to lead you (as it did Jesus) into the belly of the beast, into a place where you can’t fix it, you can’t control it, and you can’t explain it or understand it. That’s where transformation most easily happens. That’s when you’re uniquely in the hands of God.
Suffering is the only thing strong enough to destabilize the imperial ego. It has to be led to the edge of its own resources, so it learns to call upon the Deeper Resource of who it truly is, which is the God Self, the True Self, the Christ Self, the Buddha Self—use the words you want. It is who we are in God and who God is in us. At this place you are indestructible!
Adapted from The Authority of Those Who Have Suffered (MP3 download)
and A New Way of Seeing, A New Way of Being: Jesus and Paul,
Disc 2 (CD, MP3 download)Gateway to Silence:
God is in this with us.
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