0+ and want to know what it looks like and means to be an 'adult of the Lord.'" I was awakened with her words and have long been grateful. Here's the gentle padre's take for today...We can’t understand many of the key teachings of Jesus in the first half of life, which is all about creating my own boundaries and superior identity. If we still live under the law, we will not comprehend 90% of what Jesus taught, which is from the wisdom level. Something like loving your enemies or overlooking personal offenses, for example, is unreal and impossible for us, and so we have to dismiss it, consciously or unconsciously.
The “small self” is incapable of obeying such clear teachings from Jesus, so it will usually whittle down his Gospel to some moral issue that asks very little of me—and an awful lot from others (I will let you fill in the examples here!). Ironically, these are invariably things that Jesus never talked about once! (I will let you fill in the examples here).
It’s only the “God self” that ca
n love its enemies, overlook offenses, and care for the poor and the outsider. Hopefully we have begun to fall into this Larger Self by the second half of our lives, although some few wise and suffering children get their earlier. And many old folks are still “children,” spiritually speaking. They are elderly but not elders.
n love its enemies, overlook offenses, and care for the poor and the outsider. Hopefully we have begun to fall into this Larger Self by the second half of our lives, although some few wise and suffering children get their earlier. And many old folks are still “children,” spiritually speaking. They are elderly but not elders. Like Robert Bly once said, "Not all chronologically old people have learned from life; some are cranky, some are fools and some are overly sentimental and you wonder if age hasn't been wasted on them." And so it goes...
2 comments:
Is age wasted on the elderly? :)
we just finished reading "Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality" here at Sylvania. it was fantastic. he tackles so many things, from Giradian theology to radical servant-hood and openness. i loved it. thanks for posting this RJ.
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