We don’t come to God by doing it right. Please believe me on this. We come to God by doing it wrong. Any guide of souls knows this to be true. If we come to God by being perfect, no one is going to come to God. This absolutely levels the playing field. Our failures open our hearts of stone and move the rigid mind space toward understanding and patience. It is in doing it wrong, being rejected, and experiencing pain that we are lead to total reliance upon God. I wish it were not true. But all I know at this point in my journey is that God has let me do just about everything wrong, so I could fully experience how God can do everything so utterly right. I don’t know how else I could know that so fully in my gut.
This is why Christianity has as its central symbol of transformation a naked, bleeding man who is the picture of failing, losing, and dying . . . and who is really winning–and revealing the secret pattern to those who will join him there. Everyone wins because if there’s one thing we all have in common, if we’re honest, it’s our weakness and powerlessness in one–but usually many–areas of our lives. There’s a broken, wounded part inside each of us.
In a world where imperfection seems to be everywhere, the humble and honest have a huge head start in spiritual matters and can first and always find God in their simple lives. Jesus says, using the present tense, “To the poor in spirit the kingdom of heaven belongs” (Matthew 5:3). It is a now experience, not a later reward.
Entering the spiritual journey through the so-called negative, or what seems like the back door, takes all elitism out of spirituality, which is its most common temptation. We are not to be rewarded for our virtue later; virtue is its own reward–now–for both me and for others. The usual claims which appeal to our ego self (“I am an advanced person”) are of no use whatsoever and are actually revealed as much of the problem. The quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is calmly acknowledged littleness. Then you have nothing to prove, to protect, or to promote. You are already at home base. Our conscious need for daily mercy is our only real boarding pass for heaven. The ego does not like that very much, but the soul fully understands.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis
A Christian, or any holy person, is someone who is animated by the Holy Spirit, 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, or that you even belong to the right Jesus group. As Paul said to the Athenians, “The God whom I proclaim is in fact the one you already worship without knowing it” (Acts 17:23).
In Matthew 25, the dead say, “When have we seen you hungry? When have we seen you thirsty?” And the Christ says in return, “Because you did it for these little ones, you did it for me.” In each case, they did not know, at least consciously; that they were doing it for God or Jesus or even love. They just did it, and presumably from a pure heart, without any obvious religious affiliation or other motive.
It never depends upon whether we say the right words, or practice the right ritual, but whether we live the right reality. It is rather clear to me now that the Spirit gets most of her work done by stealth and disguise, not even caring who gets the credit, and not just by those who say, “Lord, Lord!” (Matthew 7:21). Jesus seems to be making this exact point in his story of the two sons (Matthew 21:28-32). The one who actually acts, even if he says the wrong words, “does the Father’s will,” and not the one who just says the right words.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go
