Immortal Diamond 3-17-2015

[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 7/5/2025] 

Larry Bolanger lent me his copy of Richard Rohr's Immortal Diamond: The Search of our True Self (Jossey-Bass, 2013). Rohr is Father Richard, a Franciscan priest. This has given me much to think about. Not a little bit are the echoes of - and even citations to - the Orthodox tradition. Nietzsche would have fits of Christianity. Yet, Rohr argues this is the proper attitude of Christianity. I found the same ideas in Orthodoxy as Rohr. I also find a problem - that of fear, of ego - cited by Rohr in the nature of religious organizations limiting the religion within borders. In our case, it is the ethnics - essentially all Greeks - disliking the non-ethnics. Whether they doubt our sincerity or dislike our SO status, or consider us as Americans trespassing, we have no idea and no remedy other than our faith in endurance for a great goal.

 Rohr identifies our ego as a false self and our soul as our True Self. I find nothing heretical in his ideas. That Protestantism has drained life - and quite possibly meaning - by its legalistic legalism, I agree with. That the Great Schism deprived the Western Church of a ready source of mystical energy seems a likely explanation from my own readings besides this book. Christianity is about love. When has love ever thrived on logic?

 Some thoughts from Father Rohr's book:

... I am going to make a rather absolute statement: people who risk intimacy are invariably happier and much more real people. They feel like they have lots of "handles" that allow others to hold onto themselves. People who avoid intimacy are always and I mean always imprisoned in a small and circular world.Intimacy is the onkly gateway into the temple of human or divine love.

Chapter 8: "Intimate with Everything" 

***

I would say a very small percentage of Christians let the corporate Body of Christ carry both their goodness and their badness, both the weight of the glory and the burden of their sin, to use two of Paul's felicitous phrases. Western individualism has really done us in. It has created either ego-inflated or ego-deflated people or, more commonly, a daily seesaw between both - yet both of them are illusions. Neither your worthiness nor your unworthiness is yours alone, and it is a burden to try to maintain them a if they were. What a relief. This might be the very recipe for God's peace, which is an underlying vastness and abundance that can absorb all negativity and watch it pass away.

Chapter 9: "Love Is Stranger Than Death"

Think about what Rohr writes. Read his book. 

I wonder if my problems with intimacy explain my doubts of fiath. Eh, TJ, or A, or T2, any thoughts on this?

Sorry about the length but I hope it's wholeness worked for you.

sch