Thursday, June 3, 2010

God's Judgment


From Richard Rohr:

FOLLOWING THE MYSTICS

Question of the Day: How does God’s judgment differ from that of human beings?
Those who pray learn to favor and prefer God’s judgment over that of human beings. God always outdoes any of us in generosity and in receptivity. God is always more loving than the person who has ever loved you the most! All you can bring is today’s latest product, whatever it is, for a new dose of love. It will always be immature on some level. It will always be inadequate, but that is not the point. It is not the perfection of the gift, but the willingness to lovingly offer the gift anyway, that pleases all parents and surely then the “Super Parent” that some of us call God.

God does not lead the soul by shaming it, just as a good parent would not shame their child. It doesn’t work anyway. We all have done it at times, and if we were raised in a punitive way ourselves, we still tend to think that’s the way to motivate people—by shaming them or making them feel guilty. I’ve done it enough and I’ve received it enough to know that it eventually backfires. It never works. We close down and stop trusting after that, and we use all kinds of defense mechanisms to avoid further vulnerability. So God uses a way that actually works, which is to love you at even deeper levels than you can know or love yourself.

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