The “Principle of Likeness” means that like knows like, love in me knows love. And hate in me will see hate everywhere else. If there’s no love in you, if you are filled with fear and hatred, you will not know God. You actually can’t. There’s no abiding place for an infinite God in you, because your field is too small and safe. The infinite cannot abide inside of the finite unless the finite is somehow released from its small boundaries and attracted outward into a Larger Field. I actually think that is what we mean by “salvation.”
The commandments, you know, are not requirements to get God to love you. That is forever and already taken care of. Moral mandates are requirements for your own self expansion and transformation, allowing you to begin to see in a broad and non-self-referential way. They put up necessary barriers to your natural egocentricity and allow you to encounter and reverence the other precisely as other (and not me!), and frankly so you can recognize your own stingy spirit. How can you possibly be prepared to know the Ultimate Other, that some of us call God, if you cannot stretch yourself to meet the little every day needs of “others” that are often an irritant, a demand, a stretch?
Each daily encounter is your chance for training and concrete practice in mercy, forgiveness, and compassion. As this love place grows within you, you will be more and more capable of knowing and loving God too. Although to be honest, I am not sure which comes first? Do loving people meet God or do people who have met God know how to love? All I know is that there is eventually a major equivalence between you and the God you worship. If you are a merciful, forgiving person, then I know you’ve met the real God. If you are narrow, stingy, and fearful, then you are worshiping something that is not God, probably some form of yourself.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Enneagram as a Tool for Your Spiritual Journey
Breathing Yahweh
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the Jewish revelation of the name of God. As we Christians spell and pronounce it, the word is Yahweh. In Hebrew, it is the sacred Tetragrammaton YHVH (yod, he, vay, and he). I am told that those are the only consonants in the Hebrew alphabet that are not articulated with lips and tongue. Rather, they are breathed, with the tongue relaxed and lips apart. YHVH was considered a literally unspeakable word for Jews, and any attempt to know what they were talking about was “in vain.” As the commandment said: “Do not utter the name of God in vain” (Exodus 20:7). All attempts to fully think God are in vain. From God’s side, the divine identity was kept mysterious and unavailable to the mind. When Moses asked for the divinity’s name, he received only the phrase that translates “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14).
This unspeakability has long been recognized, but now we know it goes even deeper: formally the name of God was not, could not be spoken at all—only breathed. Many are convinced that its correct pronunciation is an attempt to replicate and imitate the very sound of inhalation and exhalation. Therefore, the one thing we do every moment of our lives is to speak the name of God. This makes the name of God our first and last word as we enter and leave the world.
When considered in this way, God is suddenly as available and accessible as the very thing we all do constantly—breathe. Exactly as some teachers of prayer say, “Stay with the breath, attend to your breath”—the same breath that was breathed into Adam’s nostrils by this Yahweh (Genesis 2:7); the very breath “spirit” that Jesus handed over with trust on the cross (John 19:30) and then breathed on us as shalom, forgiveness, and the Holy Spirit all at once (John 20:21-23). And isn’t it wonderful that breath, wind, spirit, and air are precisely nothing—and yet everything?
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
