Faith in God is not just faith to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence in Love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. At its core, reality is okay. God is in it. God is revealed in all things, even through the tragic and sad, as the revolutionary doctrine of the cross reveals!
—Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love
Father Richard Rohr reminds us that we are never separate from the love of God:
We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God’s love is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another breath, it means that God is choosing us now and now and now and now. We have nothing to attain or even learn. We do, however, need to unlearn some things.
To become aware of God’s loving presence in our lives, we must accept that human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We’re sleepwalkers. All great religious teachers have recognized that we human beings do not naturally “see”; we have to be taught how. Jesus says further, “If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light” (Luke 11:34). Religion is meant to teach us how to witness and be present to reality. That’s why the Buddha and Jesus say with one voice, “Be awake.” Jesus talks about “staying watchful” (Matthew 25:13; Luke 12:37; Mark 13:33–37), and “Buddha” means “I am awake” in Sanskrit.
All spiritual disciplines have one purpose: to get rid of illusions so we can be more fully present to what is. These disciplines exist so that we can see what is, see who we are, and see what is happening. What is is love, so much so that even the tragic will be used for purposes of transformation into love. It is God, who is love, giving away God every moment as the reality of our life. Who we are is love, because we are created in God’s image. What is happening is God living in us, with us, and through us as our unique manifestation of love. And each one of us is a bit different because the forms of love are infinite. [1]
May we pray together:
God, lover of life, lover of these lives,
God, lover of our souls, lover of our bodies, lover of all that exists:
It is your love that keeps it all alive….
May we live in this love.
May we never doubt this love.
May we know that we are love,
That we were created for love,
That we are a reflection of you,
That you love yourself in us and therefore we are perfectly lovable.
May we never doubt this deep and abiding and perfect goodness.
We are because you are. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 25.
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Healing Our Violence Through the Journey of Centering Prayer (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2002), Audible audio ed.
Image credit and inspiration: Aaron Burden, Untitled (detail), 2016, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. When will this water drop? We don’t know what will happen but Love is with us regardless.
Story from Our Community:
About five years ago, I began a spiritual path in earnest in response to an experience of great sorrow and failure in my life. I was a non-practicing Catholic and the more I learned about [other faiths], the more complicated spirituality seemed to be…. With all these different theological viewpoints, languages, philosophies, I couldn’t see spiritual wisdom as anything other than overly complicated. Finally, with the challenges of the world, I was forced (or divinely led) into more clarity. I have learned to be more discerning, and I am beginning to understand the long journey of the truly simple spiritual life.
—Marilyn G.
