Monday, May 23, 2011

Why Didn't Someone Tell Me That Earlier? By Richard Rohr

The line I often quote from Paula D’Arcy should be obvious:  “God comes to you disguised as your life.”  Why didn’t someone tell me that earlier—that this life is the raw material that I need to take seriously?  Every day, what’s right in front of me is the agenda.  And even more, the natural world all around us has all the lessons that we need for life, love, death, and salvation.  Really!  Just look and listen, and note how Jesus himself seems to have looked and listened to lilies, birds, hens, sheep, “red sky in the morning,” green and dry wood, moth and worm, etc.

You can see how merely believing doctrines and practicing rituals is very often a clever diversionary tactic to avoid my actual life—to avoid the agenda that is right in front of me every day, which is always messy, always muddy, always mundane, always ordinary—and all around me.

By Richard Rohr

Adapted from Emerging Church Conference, Swannick, England, 2010 (unpublished) Website: https://cac.org/index.html


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