Category Archives: Fr. Richard Rhor

Concrete Participation _Practice_Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation _April 16, 2016

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As we turn toward participation we now can see that most of religious and church history has been largely preoccupied with religious ideas, about which you could be wrong or right. When faith is all about ideas, you do not have to be part of it; you just need to talk correctly about it. You never have to dive in and illustrate that spiritual proof is only in the pudding.
The spiritual question is this: Does one’s life give any evidence of an encounter with God? Does this encounter bring about in you any of the things that Paul describes as the “fruits” of the spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22)? Are you different from your surroundings, or do you reflect the predictable cultural values and biases of your group?
The “participatory turn” is learning from concrete practices, personal disciplines, and interactive dialogues that change the seer and allow and encourage the encounter itself. Many Christians today are rediscovering prayer beads, prayer of quiet, icons, contemplative sits, Taizé chants, charismaticprayer, walking meditation, Zen chores, extended silence, solitude, and disciplined spiritual direction. Up to now, you could have a doctorate in theology as a Catholic or Protestant and not really know how to pray or even enjoy prayer (experienced union), although you could recommend it officially to others and maybe even define it. Now we know that we must personally live our faith.

I hope you will dive into your faith and experiment with ways of opening yourself to transformation, to encounter, to conscious participation in God.
Gateway to Silence
Spirit of Love in me, love through me.

The Yaweh Prayer

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A rabbi taught this prayer to me many years ago. I write about it in the second chapter of my book The Naked Now. The Jews did not speak God’s name, but breathed it with an open mouth and throat: inhale–Yah; exhale–weh. By our very breathing we are speaking the name of God and participating in God’s breath. This is our first and our last word as we enter and leave the world.

Breathe the syllables with open mouth and lips, relaxed tongue:

Inhale–Yah

Exhale–weh

 During a period of meditation, perhaps twenty minutes, use this breath as a touchstone. Begin by connecting with your intention, your desire to be present to God. Breathe naturally, slowly, and deeply, inhaling and exhaling Yah-weh. Let your focus on the syllables soften and fall away into silence. If a thought, emotion, or sensation arises, observe but don’t latch on to it. Simply return to breathing Yah-weh.

You may be distracted numerous times. And perhaps your entire practice will be full of sensations clamoring for attention. Contemplation is truly an exercise in humility! But each interruption is yet another opportunity to return to Presence, to conscious participation in God’s life.

From:  Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation April 9,2016

Night of the Soul

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The Center for Action and Contemplation_ Meditation Practice-

Week October 19 – 25, 2014

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation

 

 
 

Night of the Soul Sunday, October 19, 2014
There comes to many seekers, at some time or a few times in their lives, a “dark night,” a period of seeming distance from God, from the ways in which we’ve experienced and understood God. The previous comforts have fallen away and we can no longer conceptualize God.

John of the Cross gave a map of sorts through these dark nights. He distinguished between the dark night of sense (in which all perceptions of God vanish) and the dark night of the spirit (in which we no longer graspideas about God). The goal of these times is to draw the self beyond ego into full transfiguration and union in God. John went through such a dark period during a time when he was imprisoned, tortured, and starved. He felt as if his Beloved had abandoned him.

After John miraculously escaped from prison, he composed his mystical poem “The Dark Night of the Soul.”  Almost a year later he wrote the commentary to the poem, which is also titled The Dark Night of the Soul. In her translation, Mirabai Starr writes:

“In the dark night, says John, the secret essence of the soul knows the truth, and is calling out to God: Beloved, you pray, please remind me again and again that I am nothing. Strip me of the consolations of my complacent spirituality. Plunge me into the darkness where I cannot rely on any of my old tricks for maintaining my separation. Let me give up on trying to convince myself that my own spiritual deeds are bound to be pleasing to you. Take all my juicy spiritual feelings, Beloved, and dry them up, and then please light them on fire. Take my lofty spiritual concepts and plunge them into darkness, and then burn them. Let me love you, Beloved. Let me quietly and with unutterable simplicity just love you.”

Gateway to Silence:
“Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover.” – John of the Cross
 

 
 

 

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation

Luminous Darkness

Inexplicable Darkness Monday, October 20, 2014
St. John of the Cross writes, in his prologue to The Ascent of Mount Carmel:

“A deeper enlightenment and wider experience than mine is necessary to explain the dark night through which a soul journeys toward that divine light of perfect union with God that is achieved, insofar as possible in this life, through love. The darknesses and trials, spiritual and temporal, that fortunate souls ordinarily undergo on their way to the high state of perfection are so numerous and profound that human science cannot understand them adequately. Nor does experience of them equip one to explain them. Only those who suffer them will know what this experience is like, but they won’t be able to describe it.”

You can’t go forward by “knowing” in the usual way, but only byexperiencing. At some time in your life, I hope you are so ambushed by God, that God catches you by surprise. If you try to go by what you already know—John of the Cross makes it clear—you will pull God back into your pre-existent categories, and you won’t get very far. That is why most people stay with their childish faith.

When God leads you into a dark night, it is to deepen and mature your faith—which, by its very definition, “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend. During the dark night the tried-and-true rituals and creeds of religion no longer satisfy or bring assurances of God’s love. (So you might get bored with church services for very good reasons too, but that is not the same as mere spiritual laziness or a lack of faith.)

God is calling you into deeper and closer intimacy, beyond anything you could achieve with your most sincere attempts, closer than you could even dream.  But you must learn to proceed without any guarantees from your feelings or your intellect. That’s the only real way to grow in faith and divine love.

Adapted from Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 2 (CD, MP3 download)

Gateway to Silence:
“Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover.” – John of the Cross
 

 

 

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation

Luminous Darkness

Surrendering in Stillness Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Mirabai Starr, who will be joining us for CONSPIRE 2015 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, writes of the dark night as one who has gone through it herself, like John of the Cross:

“The dark night descends on a soul only when everything else has failed. When you are no longer the best meditator in the class because your meditation produces absolutely nothing. When prayer evaporates on your tongue and you have nothing left to say to God. When you are not even tempted to return to a life of worldly pleasures because the world has proven empty and yet taking another step through the void of the spiritual life feels futile because you are no good at it and it seems that God has given up on you, anyway.

“This, says John, is the beginning of blessedness! This is the choiceless choice when the soul can do nothing but surrender. Because even if you cannot sense a shred of the Beloved’s love for you, even if you can scarcely conjure up your old passion for him, it has become perfectly clear that you are incapable of doing anything on your own to remedy your spiritual brokenness. All efforts to purge your unspiritual inclinations have only honed the laser of attention on the false self. Unwilling to keep struggling, the soul finds itself surrendering to its deepest inner wound and breathing in the stillness there.

“The only action left to the soul, ultimately, is to put down its self-importance and cultivate a simple loving attention toward the Beloved. That’s when the Beloved takes over and all our holy intentions vaporize. That’s when the soul, says John, is infused passively with his love. Though his radiance is imperceptible to the faculty of the senses and invisible to the faculty of the intellect, the soul that has allowed itself to be empty can at last be filled and overflow with him.”

From Mirbai Starr’s introduction to her translation of Dark Night of the Soul

by John of the Cross

Gateway to Silence:
“Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover.” – John of the Cross
 

 

 

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation

Luminous Darkness

Ambushed by Love Wednesday, October 22, 2014
I wonder if the only way that conversion, enlightenment, and transformation ever happen is by a kind of divine ambush. We have to be caught off guard. As long as you are in control, you are going to keep trying to steer the ship by your previous experience of being in charge. The only way you will let yourself be ambushed is by trusting the “Ambusher,” and learning to trust that the darkness of intimacy will lead to depth, safety, freedom, and love.

Any use of fear techniques or trying to shame people into the spiritual journey is inherently counter- productive. It simply makes you more defensive and protective of your boundaries, but now at an unconscious level (I am afraid this is true of a high percentage of Christians, who were largely raised on fear of “hell” and social pressure). We need spiritual teachers like John of the Cross to help us see the patterns of the spiritual journey that actually work, so we can be a bit less defended, a bit less boundaried, with ourselves and with God. Only then can God do the soul forming work of seduction and union.

God needs to catch us by surprise because our very limited preexisting notions keep us and our understanding of God small. We are still trying to remain in control and we still want to “look good”! God tries to bring us into a bigger world where by definition we are not in control and no longer need to look good. A terrible lust for certitude and social order has characterized the last 500 years of Western Christianity, and it has simply not served the soul well at all. Once we lost a spirituality of darkness as its own kind of light, there just wasn’t much room for growth in faith, hope, and love.

So God has to come indirectly, catching us off guard and out of control, when we are empty instead of full of ourselves. That is why the saints talk about suffering so much. They are not masochistic, sadistic, negative, morbid, or oppositional. The mystics have seen the pattern and, as Teresa of Ávila says in one place, it is not that you are happy for the suffering—who would be, who could be?—you are happy for the new level of intimacy that the suffering brought you to. You only know this after the fact, perhaps days or weeks or even years later. One day you realize, “God is so real to me now. How did I get here?” All you know is that you did not engineer or even imagine this. You were taken there when you were off guard. John’s word for that is darkness.

Adapted from Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 2 (CD, MP3 download)

Gateway to Silence:
“Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover.” – John of the Cross
 

 

 

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation

Luminous Darkness

Holding the Darkness Thursday, October 23, 2014
When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world—and do not spend our lives running from necessary suffering—we will surely encounter various forms of “crucifixion.” Many say pain is merely physical discomfort, but suffering comes from our resistance to, denial of, and our sense of injustice or wrongness about that pain. This is the core meaning of suffering on one level or another, and we all learn it the hard way.

As others have said, pain is the rent we pay for being human, but suffering is to some degree optional. The cross was Jesus’s voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with all the pain of the world. Deep reflection on this mystery can change your whole life. It seems there is an inherent negative energy or resistance from all of us, whenever we are invited to a more generous response. Yet this is the necessary dying that the soul must walk through to go higher, further, deeper, or longer. The saints called these dyings “nights,” darkness, unknowing, doubt. This is when you grow—but “in secret.”

Our secular world has almost no spiritual skills to deal with this now, so we resort to addictions, and other distractions to get us through our pain and sufferings. This does not bode well for the future of humanity. Only truly inspired souls choose to fully jump on board this ship of life and death. The rest of us waste our time blaming or playing the victim to our own advantage.

Without the inner discipline of faith (“positive holding instead of projecting”) most lives end in negativity, blaming others, or deep cynicism—without even knowing it. Jesus hung in the crucified middle and paid the price for all such reconciliation (Ephesians 2:13–18); he then invited us to do the same, and showed us the outcome—which is resurrection!

Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi,

pp. 21-22

Gateway to Silence:
“Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover.” – John of the Cross
 

 

 

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation

Luminous Darkness

A Bright Sadness Friday, October 24, 2014
“Because I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit.”
—Thomas Merton, “The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window”

There is a gravitas in the second half of life, but it is now held up by a much deeper lightness, or “okayness.” Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense. There is still darkness in the second half of life—in fact maybe even more. But there is now a changed capacity to hold it creatively and with less anxiety. It is what John of the Cross called “luminous darkness,” and it explains the simultaneous coexistence of deep suffering and intense joy that we see in the saints, which is almost impossible for most of us to imagine.

Life is much more spacious now, the boundaries of the container having been enlarged by the constant addition of new experiences and relationships. You are like an expandable suitcase, and you became so almost without your noticing. Now you are just here, and here holds more than enough. Such “hereness,” however, has its own heft, authority, and influence.

One’s growing sense of infinity and spaciousness is no longer found just “out there” but most especially “in here.” The inner and the outer have become one. You can trust your inner experience now, because even God has allowed it, used it, received it, and refined it. As St. Augustine dramatically put it in his Confessions:

You were within, but I was without. You were with me, but I was not with you. So you called, you shouted, you broke through my deafness, you flared, blazed, and banished my blindness, you lavished your fragrance, and I gasped.

Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,

pp. 117, 119, 121-122

Gateway to Silence:
“Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover.” – John of the Cross
 

 

 

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation

Luminous Darkness

Sabbath Meditation Saturday, October 25, 2014
Remember:
The goal of the dark night of the soul is to draw the self beyond ego into full transfiguration and union in God. (Sunday)
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.(Monday)
“The only action left to the soul, ultimately, is to put down its self-importance and cultivate a simple loving attention toward the Beloved.” –Mirabai Starr (Tuesday)
God needs to catch us by surprise because our very limited preexisting notions keep us and our understanding of God small.(Wednesday)
Without the inner discipline of faith (“positive holding instead of projecting”) most lives end in negativity, blaming others, or deep cynicism. (Thursday)
“You called, you shouted, you broke through my deafness, you flared, blazed, and banished my blindness, you lavished your fragrance, and I gasped.” —St. Augustine (Friday)
Rest: Keep Praying

I came out of seminary in 1970 thinking that my job was to have an answer for every question. What I’ve learned since then is that not-knowing and often not even needing to know is a deeper way of knowing and a deeper form of compassion. Maybe that is why Jesus praised faith even more than love; maybe that is why Saint John of the Cross called faith “luminous darkness.”

That’s why all great traditions teach some form of contemplation, because it is actually a different form of knowledge that emerges inside of the “cloud of unknowing.” It is a refusal to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and finding freedom, grace, and comfort in the not needing to know, which ironically opens us up to a much deeper consciousness that we would call the mind of God. That’s because our small mind and lesser self is finally out of the way.

My contemplative sit every morning is an exercise in assured failure. It’s often only in the last 30 seconds that I begin to get a glimpse of freedom, but for the most part, my prayer is a continual practice of surrender, kenosis.I often turn to the words, “Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy.” It is simply a confession of my incompetence and inadequacy. This confession leaves inside me an emptiness that becomes readiness. I realize I need help, I need more, I need love. I in my I-ness, my Richard-ness, I don’t know how to do this by myself, and that’s really okay. In fact, it is good because it realigns me with the truth of divine union.

The only people who pray well are those who keep praying. In the dark night, when all other practices and beliefs about God lose their meaning, keep returning to silent, contemplative prayer. It will keep you empty and ready for God’s ongoing revelation of an ever deeper love.

Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality, pp. 38-39;

and Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 9 (CD, MP3 download)

Gateway to Silence:
“Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover.” – John of the Cross
For Further Study:

Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi

Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

Intimacy: The Divine Ambush

(CD, MP3 download)

Things Hidden: Scripture As Spirituality

 

The Path of Descent

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Almasgiving, Fasting, Prayer

The Rohr Institute’s first guided library study!

Please check this website:
Explore three downward movements of the spiritual journey

Meeting the St. Paul You Never Knew. Webcast (1)

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Notes from the Webcast February 25, 2014 (1)

(First 30 min. Josefina Fernandez.
Please continue on Gretchen Tucker notes  for the second part of the webcast)

 Fr. Rhor is presenting a Core of ideas about the worldview that St. Paul tries to clarify.
-Paul is the outsider that takes the inside. He is a critic of the religion of Judaism and the new religion of Christianity.
– He is the founder of the Church: Jesus proclaims the reign of God and he comes with a vehicle to communicate this message.
– He talks more about the Christ.
– He took the courage to take the Roman Empire in his quest.
– All his experience started on Damascus where he meets Christ and no Jesus. He meets this Great Spirit on the world and it is the same kind experience we have.
– He writes letters as a way of pastoral teaching and his way is very dialectic. He makes very strong contrast trying to bring higher synthesis. He is leading to a new awareness that he calls the Mystery of Christ.
– He was not one the 12 disciples.
– He did not know Jesus on the flesh.
– He is a Jew that rejected his own traditions in many ways. Jews are monotheist and Paul was talking on his teachings of God the Father, God the Holy Spirit and Jesus as the son of God. He was very comfortable talking with this vocabulary. It took 3 centuries to understand that Paul was talking about the Holy Trinity.
-Where does Paul’s get this authority? He gets it from the encounter of this new kind of God.
– He did not reject Judaism by the contrary he concentrated and went to preach at the synagogues. After 10 years of rejection he started thinking that this message is not for Judaism and it is for everybody.
 
 Universal messages for everybody. He presents a cosmic Christ: Christ is the pre-existing blueprint (Colossian and Ephesians letters). He is the one that identify Christ with humanity at its lowest level, most humiliating state and what he calls the mystery of the cross. Then he states that Christ is the final goal of history and it is what he calls the image of the risen Christ. So Christ is the one that pulls all the meaning of reality together. When Paul talks about Christ he is talking about everything. He is talking about that Christ is the pattern of the universe. We did not understand Paul in this mystical way.

Much later, we put Christ as (privatized) a private ownership and control.

This much-devolved notion of salvation is totally individualistic.

Paul is not an individualistic thinker. He is a cosmic mystical thinker. If you do not have this frame you will misinterpret what he says.

Paul keys phrase by which you can tell that he is talking about this mystical template by which all reality is explained is “In Christ “ .

Paul is a Greek speaking Jew who come from outside Israel . He is from Tarso (Turkey). He did not grow up on the Jewish ghetto so he does not have a ghetto mentality. He is a cosmopolitan person so he decided that his message belongs to all people. When the Jewish people took him in arrest he told them that he was a roman citizen so he had to be judge by roman tribunal.

He wrote most of his letters in Greek and that was the language of the elite at that time. He knew some Hebrew and Aramaic but was not his primary languages.

Paul gives shape and structure to Jesus message.

Jesus is the great proclaimer of the mystery. Jesus did not found the church, as we know it. He was just proclaiming the mysteries at higher level and Paul try to bring them to a practical pastoral level where they can happen. We know now that Paul’s communities in Corinth, Philippians, Ephesus, were not more than 40 to 45 people.

In these pagan communities that were decadent, Paul’s wanted to create small living schools. When these groups started having problems he wrote to them moralistic letters so they did no came a part and be discredit by bad behaviors these groups of people were very important for the transmission of the message and Jesus will not be trusted. When we read his letters, we think that he is talking at a moralistic level.

His letters in general were not moralistic. His concern is you to the picture of the Christ Mystery: God identification with history and humanity at its lowest most humiliating suffering level and that is what Paul’s means with Folly of the Cross or the Mystery of the Cross . So he creates the mystical foundation for Christianity. The other place we found this is in John Gospel.  And it is a Mystery. It is not something that you achieve by performance; it is something that you are already participating in it and you do not know it. And that is true today. This is what is going on.  This is what is happening. This Christ consciousness, this Trinitarian flows of life and love that we all are already flowing in. His job was to tell you that this is already the truth. It is not a new truth. It has been always been truth but we are a living in a time that we can talk about it. We can give words. We can give significance.

Another idea presented in Paul that we are unable to develop in this short lecture is the that he takes the Jesus notion of the reign of God, the kingdom of God, the big picture and he really politicized

Please continue on Gretchen Tucker notes  for the second part of the webcast)

Josefina Fernandez

Transformative Suffering

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I am presenting a summary of the daily meditations that Fr. Rhor presented this week.

1. If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. (Sunday)

2. Jesus is not observing human suffering from a distance; he is somehow in human suffering with us and for us. (Monday)

3. Don’t get rid of the pain until you’ve learned its lessons. (Tuesday)

4. Suffering is the only thing strong enough to destabilize the imperial ego. (Wednesday)

5. The cross is always unto resurrection. (Thursday)

6. Transformed people transform people. (Friday)

 

 

Meeting the St.Paul You Never Knew Webcast (2)

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Notes from the Webcast February 25, 2014 (1)  

By Gretchen Tucker 

Paul met Christ on road to Damascus
                   Cosmopolitan, Roman citizen, spoke and wrote in Greek, Jew
                  Speaks with inner authority and clarity of new kind of God
                  Doesn’t think he is leaving Judaism
                  Ten years later his message is not for Jews but for Gentiles
                 
Saw Christ as cosmic mystical thinker-“In Christo”
                  Universal message
                  Cosmic vision of Christ: pre creation, humanity (cross),
                                  resurrection (return to universe)
                  Gave shape and structure to Christ’s teachings
 
Founder of Church
                  Established “living schools” of 40 “stars” in middle of pagans 
                   throughout Mediterranean area
                  Not a moralist but a mystic                 
                  Tries to correct to keep living schools alive
                  Taught that we are already participating in the mystery
                                    Saw Trinitarian life as already the truth
 
Paul believed Jesus brought the reign of God, the Kingdom of God                 
                  Made political statement “Jesus is Lord”
 
Paul took on two systems of world with opposing ideas–dualism                 
                  Pius: Jews and others of conservative belief
                  Greeks: Hellenistic  and intellectual liberals
                  Paul was a mystic-has a higher level of thinking
                                    Need to struggle with two sides
                                                  – either is off balance
                                    Must reconcile them
                                               Pattern of the soul, history,  Bible
                                                  – progress marked by 3 steps forward
                                                    and 2 backward
                                              God leads us back to the center
 
1. Dualistic Problem of One and Many
We are either a hand, an eye, etc. yet participating in the whole
                    body of Christ
 2. Dualistic Problem of Jews and Greeks
Conservative Thinkers and Liberal Thinkers
Folly of the Cross-God identified with humanity
                  Became problem so that we would not……
Problem of injustice in obeying laws-God accepts absurdity
                    of full obedience                 
                  Our imperfection is forgiven
Problem of suffering and woundedness
                  God is happening in me, with me
                  Concern: child of God; rejection on earth;
                                 resurrection = optimistic message                 
3. Dualistic Problem of Tradition and Freedom
                  We can’t create freedom by trying
                  Law created to teach that we can’t do it
                  We then fall into mystery of Christ
                  Find ourselves in God by grace
4. Dualistic Problem of Flesh and Spirit: Part and whole
                  Flesh is not body or sex, but ego,
                                id—trapped self, imprisoned…,false…,small…, petty…
                  Invites into world of spirit; not achieved by
                                trying harder or surrendering more
                  Realize we are sons of God, daughters of the
                               Lord-get back to identity
                  God loves so be moral
                  Transformed heart does not see others as immoral
5. When I am weak, I am strong
                  Spirituality of imperfection
                  St. Therese: My Little Way-come to God by being weak;
                                 also Francis
                  Not taught by Church—instead climbing performance                 
                                   Priests trained in Cannon Law
                  Paul in Romans and Galatians oppose:
                                  cannot get there by obeying
                                  Theologian of Grace: unconditional love
                  Martin Luther tried but Lutherans turned to law
6. Christ and Adam
                  Inclusive of Jews and Greeks, conservative and liberals
                                     Covered in Colossians and Philippians
7. Matter and Spirit
                  Covered in Romans 8 and 1Corinthians 2
                  Eucharist-matter and spirit: we are what we eat and drink
                  Mystery of transformation-struggle with idea but we eat it
                                    Moves you beyond words
                                    Can be experienced but not understood
8. Creation and Salvation
                  Romans 8: All creation is on tiptoe
                  All creation being saved
9. Turn upside down
                  New understanding in society : undo class systems
                  Come together in Eucharist
                                    Meal is transformational ritual
                                    Bread and wine-priests in charge
                                    Potluck supper (bread and fish)-revolution of social order
                  Probably the dualism is Foolishness and Wisdom
10. Old covenant and new covenant is dualism
                                    Split with Judaism lasted until today

Master teacher of non-violence
His writings are underpinnings

Mysticism is key
                  Corinthians, Colossians, Ephesians-written between 57-67AD
                  Hebrews and 1st Timothy-not written by Paul

                                    Paul did 1st editing and someone else took over

 Church became dualistic after 1200
                   Result of people being able to read
                   Priests concerned about their career
                   Monks began going to monasteries in 317 AD: mystics
 
Mystical gift
                    Communicated experience
                    See in wholes and not in parts
 
Kenosis–Philippians: God “emptied himself” of his own will
 
Nature of God-God can only love, God as stingy, cannot be 

Folly of Cross-descent or letting go rather than climbing and performing

Only appeals to wounded

Death and Resurrection-have to be lost and be re-found
                   Crucified and resurrected at the same time

 

Paul’s Theology
                       We came from God and will return to God
                        Our job is to bring this creation to fulfillment, i.e., resurrection
                        God will resurrect and transform what man kills
                        All saved by mercy, by grace of God

 

Alpha and Omega-Christ mystery

Cosmic Christ gives theater of hope
                      Life is worth living
                      In hands of God
                      Loss and renewal pattern
                      Trust as Jesus did
                      Live in safety, not meaningless
                     Long for wisdom and purpose
 
In Christ no distinction between male and female
                    Church has given too much authority to these negative passages