The Spirit is with you and the Spirit is in you. — JOHN 14:17
The Gift Is Already Given
"Our hope is not deceptive. The love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. — ROMANS 5:5
You already know. The Spirit is with you and the Spirit is in you. — JOHN 14:17
The future is by definition the unsayable and the uncontrollable, filled with paradoxes, mysteries, and confusions. It is an imperfect world at every level. Therefore, the future is always, somehow, crazy. We attempt to build for ourselves many protections against this imperfection, even in the patterns of our mind. This unsayable future—preparing for it and also fearing it—determines much of our lives. Thus we search for predictability, explanation, and order to give ourselves some sense of peace and control.
Even much of religion itself has become a search for social order, group cohesion, and personal worthiness, or a way of escaping into the next world, which unfortunately destroys most of its transformative power. True spirituality is not a search for perfection or control or the door to the next world; it is a search for divine union now. The great discovery is always that what we are searching for has already been given! I did not find it; it found me. It is Jacob's shout of Eureka! at the foot of his ladder to heaven in Genesis 28:16-17.
Union and perfection are two different journeys with very different strategies. Common religion seeks private perfection; the mystics seek and enjoy the foundation itself—divine union, totally given. Personal perfection insists on private knowing and certitude. Surprisingly, union is a much better way of knowing. It is a shared knowing that is much more solid and consoling...
The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection—and told us that we must do the same or we would never be contend on this earth. This is what makes Jesus so counterintuitive to most eras and cultures, and why most never perceived the great good news in this utter shift of consciousness. That failure to understand his core message, and a concrete program by which you could experience this truth yourself, is at the center of our religious problem today. We looked for hope where it was never promised, and no one gave us the proper software so we could hope for ourselves, least of all in disorder and imperfection! Worst of all, we did not know that hope and union are the same thing, and that real hope has nothing to do with mental certitudes.”
Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
The Crossroad Publishing Company (September 1, 2009) pp. 15-6
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