Seems I’m always on a journey of some sort, even if I don’t leave Castle Rock, Colorado. These journeys are internal. Here are notes from my current one.
I purposefully got rid of something a while back. It was my cognitive rigidity about the things of God. And the journey began.
From Father Richard Rohr. “Jesus…knows that any preoccupation with repressing the shadow does not lead us into personal transformation, empathy, compassion, or patience, but invariably into denial or disguise, repression or hypocrisy. Isn’t that rather evident? Immature religion creates a high degree of cognitively rigid people or very hateful, attacking people. It is almost the public image of Christianity today, yet God’s goal is exactly the opposite.”
From St. Teresa of Avila. “I think that His Majesty wishes we would do whatever it takes to understand ourselves. We need to quit blaming the soul for problems caused by a weak imagination, human nature, and the spirit of evil.”
I’ve suffered from a weak imagination. It’s like God offers us a PhD in a transcendent life but we tend to settle for, say, 4th grade where we think we know the basics and have God all figured out. We want to play it safe because the journey will involve suffering, but as it turns out, even that belongs.
That’s the thing about journeys. You start seeing things differently. Like suffering.
And peace.