URBANarmy

"In many ways, at least in the Western world, the church is in the desert, in a dark night, lost, being pruned, undergoing a purifying alchemy." ( Ron Rolheiser) Rolheiser goes on to  point out, "We have our good seasons, but we have seasons too where we lose relationships, lose health, lose friends, lose spouses, lose children, lose jobs, lose prestige, lose our grip, lose our dreams, lose our meaning, and end up humbled, alone, and lonely. But that’s a place too, a valid and an important one. Inside that place, our souls are being shaped in ways we cannot understand but in ways that will stretch and widen them for a deeper love and happiness in the future." Rolheiser draws a parallel with the same place of stretching and widening in  " our greying and emptying churches" where "w e’re aging, unsure of ourselves, lacking in vocation". He suggests it is  a good place to be, where humbled and insecure, we can again become church. From being  lost, ...

A useful reminder today from Ricky Rohr! "The word dialectic originally referred to the Greek art of debate. A dialectic (different than our political debates) does not move forward by either/or thinking. It’s when you play the two off of one another and then come to a tertium quid, a third something, what the inner wisdom traditions sometimes call “Third Force.” It is the process of overcoming seeming opposites by uncovering a reconciling third that is bigger than both of the parts and doesn’t exclude either of them. Such truth moves you and the conversation to a different level. "  Seems to me that there is a lot of talking that goes on without listening in all areas of life, discovering something bigger than the sum of partisan parts seems creative and exciting to me?

Lovely quote shared by the Mother of the Groom yesterday... "Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your root was so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. that is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two" (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres) A perfect link with the quote I shared. “Often we speak about love as if it is a feeling. But if we wait for a feeling of love before lo...

Top Moments (in no particular order) Being surprised by Kate and Eryn together with the Pirie clan as we returned through Kingston - Gordy! The last 50km all the way back from Box Hill - the best cycling I have experienced. Seeing Ashley flying along at our rendezvous at Tower Hill - I'm not stopping! Being cheered on by Adrian and Gill in Dorking Getting to the top of Leith Hill and having someone thank me for getting him up - cheers fella! Phil Wall's monumental fist pumping encouragement with Raynes Park SA Sharing all 100 miles with nephew Adam, including my worst Arriving at the top of Box Hill to be greeted by Neil, Ashley and Mark - chased them down at last Turning into the Mall being cheered through by Juster's, knowing we had made it in time - just! Cycling out through empty London Streets Cyclist banter Getting told off by Adam for being irresponsible going down a roller on A25 -  Low Moments  Unfortunate accidents and the congestion aftermath ...

Read this today, I love her idea of inventing new ways for love... "Our challenge today is to trust the power of love at the heart of life, to let ourselves be seized by love, to create and invent ways for love to evolve into a global wholeness of unity, compassion, justice, and peacemaking." Ilia Delio Ilia Delio,  The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love  (Orbis Books: 2013), xxv.

I've been really appreciative of Ron Roheiser's thoughts recently, here he is talking about how easy it is to lose perspective ... "When perspective is lost, the world turns upside down; contentment gives way to restlessness, humility to ambition, and patience to a hopeless pursuit of a consummation, renown and immortality that this life can never give. I know. It's happened to me, countless times; in fact it happens to me most all of the time. In my life, forever it seems, I keep losing perspective and becoming obsessed with a love l cannot have, with hurts that I cannot let go of, and with an ambition that leaves me too preoccupied, too self-absorbed and too hurried to fully notice what's around me. Like most everyone else, I spend too many hours waiting for a special phone call that doesn't come, for a special letter that doesn't arrive, for a special glance of affection that isn't given and for a special daydream to turn into reality. I spend ...

Richard Rohr highlights Dante's insight to faith development:- "In "The Inferno: Canto 1," The Divine Comedy, Dante describes the human experience: "In the middle of life, I found myself in a dark wood." If you're letting life happen to you, you will be led to the dark wood where you have to ask: "What does it all mean? Why am I doing this? Why don't I feel fully alive or that my life has meaning? What am I doing wrong?" Most of us have bouts of immense self-doubt..." Other insights and advice include... "It is only by a foundational trust in the midst of suffering, some ability to bear darkness and uncertainty, and learning to be comfortable with paradox and mystery, that you move from the first half of life to the second half." "If you don't have at least one good friend, or if you have not developed a prayer life where you know how to find yourself in God instead of in your own feelings, you will simply r...

Something to mull over this week... "What is the relation of [contemplation] to action? Simply this. He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action."   --Thomas Merton via Richard Rohr

I'm looking forward to our next 'Explore'. Note the change of time to  7:30pm Ever wondered about how and why your faith develops and matures? Often people think they are moving away from God when in fact, their faith is maturing. The irony being that while people feel they are losing their faith they are actually finding it! So together using Janet Hagberg's The Critical Journey, a closer look at Faith Development is an opportunity to for us to explore this together. Nothing intimidating just a short presentation, a bit of conversation and a picture of a tree! To whet your appetite here is a quote... “In each of us a wide mixture of behaviour both wise and unwise, healthy and unhealthy, appears.... when that behaviour begins to dominate or when we become obsessed with how we need to behave or how others need to behave, then we have a clear sign that we are becoming caged. Another sign of stuckness is having to be right and convincing others of our rightness...

Here's a bit of a Richard Rohr challenge on perspective... "In country after country that I've spoken in over the years, the laity have come to accept that the bishops and priests look out at reality from the side of management and seldom from the side of the laboring class, where Jesus unquestionably resided. When and where we did have servant leadership, the church flourished; where they didn't, we often experience, to this day and with good reason, a virulent anti-clericalism."

Richard Rohr on Faith Development... "There are many models of human and spiritual development. We could describe three stages as Simple Consciousness, Complex Consciousness (both "fight and flight"), and Non-Dual Consciousness ("the unitive way" or "third way"). More recently, I have been calling the developmental stages Order; Disorder & Reorder. In short, I see this pattern in the Bible and in human lives: 1. Order: We begin with almost entirely tribal thinking, mirroring the individual journey, which starts with an egocentric need for "order" and "self." Only gradually do we move toward inclusive love. 2. Disorder: We slowly recognize the invitation to a "face to face" love affair through the biblical dialogue of election, failure, sin, and grace, which matures the soul. This is where we need wisdom teachers to guide us through our "disorder." 3. Reorder: Among a symbolic few, there is a breakthr...

Here's something I should have said on Sunday! "God even creates the desire within us to do the desiring for love and for God. So all we need to do is to keep praying for the desire to desire, especially on those many days when the well feels dry, ordinary, or boring." (Richard Rohr) Psalm 42:1

"Accept you to be no other than your self Loving what I know of you  Trusting what I do not yet know With respect for your integrity  And faith in your abiding love for me"  Moses and Zipporah's vows.   

Just parking this quote "Once you know there is an implanted and positive direction to creation, you can go with the primary flow (faith); eventually you will learn to rest there (hope); and you can actually live this outflowing life with gracious trust (love)" Richard Rohr Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013), 85-86

Thanks to my good friend Sister Agnes, I'm really enjoying the thoughts of Ron Rolheiser  here's a challenging insight in it's entirety.... DYING IN ORDER TO LIVE APRIL 5, 1993 Leo Tolstoy once commented that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I like to think that restlessness is like that, it takes many forms but each of us is restless in his or her own way. One form of restlessness that many of us share in common, however, is a sense of feeling trapped in certain marriages, families, vocations, careers, churches, jobs and locations which frustrate us, but which, for all kinds of reasons, we feel powerless to ever leave. Hence, we live in a state of dissatisfaction and restlessness, unable really to make peace with our lot in life and yet unable to leave it either. Thus, we all know people who feel that their marriages are really not good, but who cannot ever leave those marriages, just as we know people who cannot make peace with the fact that t...

The mysticism of Rohr's thoughts often baffle me, comfort me while challenging me. I don't want to lose today's thoughts as I think there is a lot to chew over so as ever I park it here to revist. "Your True Self is who you are, and always have been in God; and at its core, it is love itself. Love is both who you are and who you are still becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own sunflower. Most of human history has referred to the True Self as your "soul" or "your participation in the eternal life of God." The great surprise and irony is that "you," or who you think you are, have nothing to do with your True Self's original creation or its ongoing existence. This is disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time. There's nothing you can do to make God love you more; and there's nothing you can do to make God love you less. All you can do is nurture your True Self, which is saying quite a lot. It is love bec...

"A lot of the world's knowledge is contained within science and philosophy, but most of the world's wisdom is contained in its religious and faith perspectives. Just as we cannot live on religion alone, so we cannot live on science and philosophy alone. Wisdom needs knowledge and knowledge needs wisdom. Science and religion need more deeply to befriend each other." Rolheiser