I find the following so hard to deal with and yet there feels to be so much integrity and truth to it. The following seems to synthesize my journey of the past 5 years exceptionally well...
"Nature is much more disorder than order, more multiplicity than uniformity, with the greatest disorder being death itself! In the spiritual life, and now in science, we learn much more by honoring and learning from the exceptions than by just imposing our previous certain rules to make everything fit. You can see perhaps what Jesus and Paul both meant by telling us to honor "the least of the brothers and sisters" (Matthew 25: 40; 1 Corinthians 12:22-25) and to "clothe them with the greatest care." It is those creatures and those humans who are on the edge of what we have defined as normal, proper, or good who often have the most to teach us. They tend to reveal the shadow and mysterious side of things. Such constant exceptions make us revisit the so-called rule and what we call normal -- and recalibrate! The exceptions keep us humble and searching, and not rushing toward resolution to allay our anxiety."
~ from page 55 of Richard Rohr's Falling Upward: A spirituality for the two halves of life
Recent Comments