Daily
Dose
“God,
give me a good humiliation everyday. It's good for the soul and it's
good for the ego.”
Richard
Rohr
As we close out 2019, and
prepare to enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, let's
give some thought to how we want the new year to be different from
the old. I think most of us can agree that it would be nice to have
less division, more cooperation, and less vitriol flying around us.
We may be wondering why “they” don't change what they are doing
to keep the maximum level of anger going. Perhaps some people truly
love the edgy, hate-filled drama that we now consider “the new
normal,” but I don't know any of them. Most people, I believe, just
want to live in peace, and to have the freedom to do their work
without being vexed by hostility. Since we cannot change
“them” what can we do to change “us?”
Here are some suggestions
from Father Richard Rohr: “There are three things we have to let
go of. The first is the compulsion to be successful. Second is the
compulsion to be right—especially theologically right (that's just
and ego trip...) Finally, there's the compulsion to be powerful, to
have everything under control.” In other words, we may want to
give up our fear-driven, success-at-all-cost way of life. Some of us
are so consumed with “getting ahead in the world” that we will
step in the face of anyone who gets in our way and that is a
soul-killing way of life. Our determination to have the last word, to
always claim “right” is what is driving a solid steel wedge
between us and anyone who disagrees with us; making it so difficult
to speak civilly to anyone who sits on the other side of that divide.
Our drive to the top is leaving too many dead bodies along the way.
Since “they” are not going to change, perhaps it's up to "us."
I believe that things
happen for a reason. I think we've dug ourselves into this hole
that's become a canyon, because we needed to find ourselves at the
bottom. We needed to ditch our ego along the way. We needed to arrive
at a place where the only way out is up—and to go up, we need help.
We cannot climb a sheer rock face without having a friend on
belay—someone who literally has our back (and our neck and all our
other parts). We need each other. If you are climbing out of that
rock canyon, it won't matter to you that whoever is holding your rope
is a republican or democrat, black or white, Muslim or Christian—you
just want someone extra-strong to secure the rope. Well, we are
climbing out, my friends, and we need one another to make it back to
sanity.
Richard Rohr says, “Life
is not a matter of creating a name for ourselves, but of uncovering
the name we've always had.” We will not be a light in the
world, a beacon of hope and possibility, if we are fighting one
another. If we want to reclaim our true name, we need to enter 2020
in humility, and with the simple determination to do our part to climb
out of this angry canyon we've created. Not only that, but we need to
haul the guy behind us out, too. We can do this, y'all. But only if
we help each other.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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