Quote of the Week

This week’s quote comes from a prominent Rabbi and while this work of his was published sixty years ago I feel it still resonates with the Church’s situation: 

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion--its message becomes meaningless.” –Abraham Joshua Heschel God in Search of Man (p. 3)

If the church is to move and work toward a new future, I can't help but feel like it will have to begin with the setting aside of discrimination complexes and doing some housekeeping in the form of reflective truth telling.

Be Fed

Van Gogh's Worn Out

I have not had the chance to sit down and write lately (due to some of the minor inconveniences of life) and I am not sure when in the next month or two I am going to.  However, until I can get back to writing I thought I might post quotes periodically for all you contemplative junkies out there, and also so I can feel like I am doing something.  So, to kick it off here is something from Rohr that is nothing short of profound:   

"Only love can know love, only mercy can know mercy, only the endless mystery I am to myself is ready for God’s Infinite Mystery.

When I can stand in mystery (not knowing and not needing to know and being dazzled by such freedom), when I don’t need to split, to hate, to dismiss, to compartmentalize what I cannot explain or understand, when I can radically accept that “I am what I am what I am,” then I am beginning to stand in divine freedom (Galatians 5:1).

We do not know how to stand there on our own. Someone Else needs to sustain us in such a deep and spacious place. This is what the saints mean by our emptiness, our poverty and our nothingness. They are not being negative or self-effacing, but just utterly honest about their inner experience.

God alone can sustain me in knowing and accepting that I am not a saint, not at all perfect, not very loving at all—and in that very recognition I can fall into the perfect love of God."   -Richard Rohr