To be a Christian means to necessarily be an optimist because we remember what happened on the third day! We know the final stage of death, Jesus’ leap of faith, was not in vain. He was not put to shame, and “God raised him up” (which is the correct way to say it, and not that he rose himself). Most of human life is Holy Saturday, a few days of life are Good Friday, but there only needs to be one single Easter Sunday for us to know the final and eternal pattern. We now live inside of such cosmic hope.
Jesus trusted enough to outstare the darkness, to outstare the void, to hold out for the resurrection of the forever-awaited “third day,” and not to try to manufacture His own. That is how God stretches and expands the soul, and makes it big enough to include God.
You see, to love fully is to die! (When you fully unite with the other, the separate self is gone.) What is handed over to God is always returned to us transformed into Christ. Easter is the eternal third day that we forever await, but today we are content to live in the belly of the whale, in liminal space, in the “in between” that is most of human life. God is creating a Big Space inside of you. Just wait!
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations
A Christian is someone who is animated by the Spirit of Christ, a person in whom the Spirit of Christ can work. That doesn’t have to mean that you consciously know what you are doing, or that you even have to know. As Paul said to the Athenians, “You have been worshiping ‘the Unknown God’ without even knowing it” (Acts 17:23).
Then again in Matthew 25, the dead say, “When have we seen you hungry? When have we seen you thirsty?” and the Eternal Christ says, “Because you did it for these little ones, you did it for me.” They did not know, consciously; they just did what they were inspired to do.
It never depends upon whether we say the right words, but whether we live the right reality. It is rather clear to me in my old age that the Spirit gets most work done by stealth and disguise, and not just by those who say, “Lord, Lord!”
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Simplicity
“And they were filled with the Holy Spirit.” ~Acts 2:4
God has grown accustomed to our small and cowardly ways of waiting behind closed doors of fear and self-doubt. God knows that we settle for easy certitudes instead of Gospel freedom, for a small god instead of a Big Mystery. Yet God seems surely determined to break through.
The Spirit eventually overcomes the obstacles that we present and surrounds us with enough peace so that we can accept the “wounds in His hands and His side”—which, I hope you know, is really to accept our own.
~Taken from Richard Rohr, Radical Grace: Daily Meditations
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” ~Acts 1:8
To span the infinite gap between the Divine and the human, God’s agenda is to plant a little bit of God, the Holy Spirit, right inside of us! (Jeremiah 31:31-34, John 14:16ff).
This is the very meaning of the “new” covenant, and the replacing of our “heart of stone with a heart of flesh” that Ezekiel promised (36:25-26). Isn’t that wonderful? It is God doing the loving, in and through us, back to God, toward our neighbor and enemy alike, and even toward the sad and broken parts of ourselves.
~Taken from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
