
Sunday
God keeps creating things from the inside out, so they are forever yearning, developing, growing, and changing for the good. To fight transformative and evolutionary thinking is, for me, to fight the very core concept of faith.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Transformation isn’t merely a change of morals, group affiliation, or belief system—although it might lead to that—but a change at the very heart of the way we receive and pass on each moment.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
The goal in waking up is not personal or private perfection, but surrender, love, and union with God. Any preoccupation with my private moral perfection keeps my eyes on myself and not on God or grace or love.
—Richard Rohr
Wednesday
If we do not have a lot of people showing up in the suffering trenches of the world, it’s probably because those of us in the world of religion have allowed them to stop with merely cleaning up, growing up, or waking up.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
Unless we are led to some kind of contemplative practices that continually reveal our dualistic, argumentative, and biased ways of thinking, we won’t move into a new stage of life. What we really need is a sustained practice that rewires and transforms our hearts and minds.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
The point appears to be not just to stay the same your whole life but to grow, to really grow and open, grow in seeing, grow in awareness.
—Paula D’Arcy
Week Twenty-Eight Practice
How We Grow
Seeds of transformation blossom when the heart’s surrender to love is complete and sincere. —Paula D’Arcy
Ilia Delio names our responsibility for our own transformation:
Of what use is it to pray and do good without being transformed? Of what use is it to hear the Word of God and not make it one’s own? Life in God is meant to be transforming, changing us from virtue to virtue and glory to glory (see 2 Corinthians 3:18). If the Word of God is not made our own, then the Scriptures have no more meaning than reading a good novel or the Sunday paper. The Word of God is meant to be taken into one’s life, consumed and digested to stimulate growth. We should grow into the freedom of love that God is. We should grow into “another Christ” renewing in our lives the mystery of divine love. Perhaps the will of God remains a question for many of us because we never get beyond the initial stage of knowing God. We never make the Word of God our own; hence, we never really come to know the truth of Christ nor are we set free….
Jesus said to his disciples, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49). As Christians we are to set the world ablaze with love, a love that radiates from the depths of our inner lives. We are to be cocreators in Christ. All that we hope for in this world cannot be realized without our transformation and participation. If we truly seek the will of God, then we must seek the path of love that will lead us to truth and from truth to freedom. Only when we are truly free will we hand ourselves over to the fire of love that purges our thick layers of selfishness and transforms us into another Christ. Then will we be able to call ourselves Christian and really mean what we say.
Reference:
Ilia Delio, Ten Evenings with God (Liguori, MO: Liguori, 2008), 111–112.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, web of water (detail), 2020, photo, Washington. Click here to enlarge image. Like this spider’s web, a ray of light can illuminate and transform us.