"Woman: Half of God’s Work of Art"

"Woman: Half of God’s Work of Art"

All this “women-stuff” is not only important, it is half of conversion, half of salvation, half of wholeness, half of God’s work of art. I believe this mystery is imaged in the Woman of the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse: “pregnant, and in labor, crying aloud in the pangs of childbirth…and finally escaping into the desert until her time” (12:1-6).

Could this be the time? It is always the time! The world is tired of Pentagons and pyramids, empires and corporations that only abort God’s child. This women-stuff is very important, and it’s always been important: more than this white male priest ever imagined or desired! My God was too small and too male. Much that the feminists are saying is very prophetic and necessary for the Church and the world. It is time for the woman to come out of her desert refuge and for the men to welcome her.

from Radical Grace, “Is This ‘Women-Stuff’ Important?”

"Women-Stuff"

"Women-Stuff"

“Women-stuff” is the hidden energy behind almost all of the justice issues. The movement toward nonviolence and disarmament, the movement against homelessness and refugee problems, the raping of the earth and its resources, sexual and physical abuse, the idolatry of profit and the corporation, the rejection of the poor – none of these will move beyond the present impasse until the underlying issues of power, prestige and possessions are exposed for the lie that they are. Humanity’s capacity to disguise its own darkness seems endless. Patriarchal logic is only logic in favor of the system and the status quo – which is proudly called “real world.” Believe me, because I always hear it quoted to me after my sermons, usually from polite men in three-piece suits: “That was an interesting talk there ‘Father,’ but you know in the real world…” The fathers of the system hate nothing more than another father who refuses the rules of the game. That is precisely our role in proclaiming the new system that Jesus called the Reign of God.

from Radical Grace, “Is This ‘Women’Stuff’ Important?”

"The First Franciscan Community"

"The First Franciscan Community"

(Recorded at the Portiuncula) There are many romantic pictures of Franciscans loving one another, praying together and lifting their hands to God. But I’m sure in this place, around this little chapel where their huts first stood, there were many days of complete doubt and disillusionment; feelings of dislike – maybe even of hatred – toward one another; doubt of the vocation in the Lord; feelings of anger; temptations of desire, lust, passion and fear – all the temptations that human beings experience. The first Franciscans were no different from any of us. But somehow, they remembered the one commandment that the Lord gave us, which is to love one another. How can we more deeply love one another? The first Franciscans put their lives together, and they remained together. They said we’re gonna stick with it until we become one. We’re gonna remain together until we can walk through these barriers to love. That will come up in every marriage, in every attempt at union and every attempt at community. We begin to see the dark parts of one another, those parts that we do not like. The way we learn to love is by walking through those: not around by avoidance, not underneath by spiritualizing, not over by denial – but though by incarnation.

from On Pilgrimage With Father Richard Rohr

"Lepers and Wolves"

"Lepers and Wolves"

It’s wonderful news, brothers and sisters, that we come to God not by our perfection but by our imperfection. Because that gives all of us the only chance we’ll ever have. And it allows us to walk, instead of a sometimes-journey of repression or denial, a journey into truth, into ever-deeper sympathy with what’s going on inside of us. Deep within each of us live a leper and a wolf. Those are the two images that have caught the imagination of the world about Francis. We’ve pictured them but never internalized them. We always pictured meetings out there: Francis meeting the leper on the road, Francis taming the wolf in Gubbio. The stories did happen historically, but first they operate in the soul. It is on the inside that lepers and wolves are first to be found. If we haven’t been able to kiss many lepers, if we haven’t been able to tame many wolves, it’s probably because we haven’t made friends with our leper and wolf within. Name your poor leper within, today. Nurse and tend her wounds. Name your inner wolf. Tame him by gently forgiveness.

from Embracing Christ As Francis Did: In the Church of the Poor

"Francis Stands for Love Emptying Itself"

"Francis Stands for Love Emptying Itself"

History eventually turns itself upside down. In the moment, the saint is never understood. So we had best be careful whom we name saint and devil. We had best listen because sometimes saints come in ways we are not prepared for. Francis wanted one thing above everything else: the poor Jesus. So he went to the caves, dressed in the ragged tunic and let the people call him foolish. Even in his age he saw the importance of being poor. He saw how the Church was being destroyed by its own riches. Above all else Francis stands for love, but love that empties itself, love that is so secure that it can be poor. It can let go of its reputation, securities, money. Francis in every age will be called the little poor man. He was free enough to be poor. He named his community “the brothers of the lower class” (friars minor). He changed sides intentionally: Today we call that taking a “preferential option for the poor.” We Americans stand for the upper class on this earth. Let us ask for ourselves and for our country the gift of poverty, the freedom to be poor. If we have not heard that, we have not heard Francis. All the rest is sentimentality – “birdbath Franciscanism.”

from On Pilgrimage With Father Richard Rohr

"In the Land of Francis"

"In the Land of Francis"

(Recorded at Assisi) St. Francis, at the end of his life, said if he had to do one thing over, he would treat Brother Ass, which is what he called his body, a little better. But what characterizes all saints is a sort of fanaticism, a single-mindedness. They know one thing is important, and they hold onto that with a kind of feverish urgency and concern. Being in Assisi helps us to see St. Francis as a real person. He had to walk back to that piazza in the clothes of a dropout and have his old friends laugh at him. He had to walk through these streets and not be received, even by most of the established Church here who thought he was a nut. A fool, they called him. And he called himself that after awhile, the “idiot of God.” After awhile he moved outside the walls. He rebuilt a little church at San Damiano and there he heard Jesus speak to him. He lived outside the city a little, at Rivotorto and at the Portiuncula because the people here thought he was useless and disrespectful of his father and the proven economic system. Little did they think that eight hundred years later they would still be living off of him, as tourists from all over the world buy pictures and statues of Francis of Assisi.

from On Pilgrimage With Father Richard Rohr

"The Holy Land Looks a Lot Like Home"

Interesting article from Richard Rohr, book “On Pilgrimage”, In this article he reminds us that God is in all of us, it is just a matter of belief and acknowledgement from our side. In addition, he also describes how our world is made of ordinary people, living in ordinary places just as you and I are living today, we are all living day by day with a purpose of making a better world enhancing our life and the life of others. Enjoy.


“ (Recorded at Nazareth) The Gospel stories take on a new and beautiful significance as we stand and we celebrate in the very spot in which Mary lived and said yes to God. It was within three hundred yards of this spot that Mary and Joseph came to the life of faith that we now have come to participate in. I’m sure as you drive today across these very ordinary-looking hills, these very ordinary-looking villages and people, it must strike you, How could Mary, Joseph, anybody, have thought they were special? We’ve idealized this land all our lives. And perhaps one of the great graces of a journey to the Holy Land is in fact to see that it’s not only ordinary but perhaps not as pretty as many parts of the world. What makes it beautiful to our eyes is what happened here. As you see these little boys running around Nazareth, as you see young girls walking through these streets and young men in working clothes, it probably was no different in Jesus’ time. And yet that woman Mary, that man Joseph, had to believe that they were the special ones of God. And that little boy Jesus who grew up in this town somehow had to dare to believe that he was God’s son. The word that comes to me at this place of the incarnation, this place where Mary said yes and the word became flesh, this place where they grew up in such ordinary circumstances, is a word of extraordinary faith. If they could believe, perhaps we can believe in our very ordinary-looking lives that God could somehow be taking flesh in us.

from On Pilgrimage With Father Richard Rohr”

"To Be Biblical"

"To Be Biblical"

To be biblical is not simply to quote the Bible. We need to tell that to the fundamentalists. To be biblical is not to quote Moses; it’s to do what Moses did. To be biblical is to do what Abraham did; it’s not it’s not to quote the Abraham story. It’s to do what Jesus did; it’s not to simply quote Jesus. Christians are to be in touch with the same God Jesus was in touch with, the same wisdom tradition Jesus drew insight from. We are to be building that same unity and creating the same life that Jesus was creating and building. That’s what it means to be biblical. I don’t see Moses quoting the Bible. I don’t see Jesus quoting the Bible as much as pointing to reality. That’s exactly why the people said, “He’s not like the scribes and Pharisees” (Mark a:22). He “teaches with authority” (Mark 1:27). But he didn’t do that by justifying everything he said with a Bible quote, which proves only a lack of authority, the inner authority of truth. The Bible is that two thousand-year graph of “listening history” that helps us guide ourselves into the future. It reveals and names the patterns that connect all things, the rhythms and seasons of faith. Jesus read reality, listened to God, gathered the tradition and then spoke truth. Now if we’re truly Catholic, it seems to me that’s what we’ve got to aim for: to be biblical by gathering the wisdom of the ages. I’m not trying to take away the authority of this book but to ground it. Its reference point is outside itself.

from The Price of Peoplehood by Richard Rohr

The Price of Greatness

"The Price of Greatness"

Ira Progoff says historically, culturally, he can prove that the only people who really achieved any greatness have been people who have agreed to live with a certain degree of stress in their lives. Now we have made stress somewhat of a bad word in recent years. We have stress workshops, and we all know you go to a certain point and stress isn’t good. But in fact, lack of stress isn’t good either. Our culture allows us constantly to coddle ourselves. We’re always getting away from one thing or another because we need to relax. The price we may pay for that is greatness. Masculinity seems instinctively to sense this need for a certain hardness, obstruction and necessary stress. You see it in men’s myths, their sports, their attitude toward childrearing. It’s half of the truth, although largely rejected by contemporary liberal thinking. Masculinity senses that criticism, trial and non-affirmation are also a way of testing the mettle and thus affirming the one tested. Masculine human nature needs to have a certain goad, an irritant that it’s butting itself up against to fashion a creative tension. There is a direct correlation between the degree of imagination and the degree of creative stress in someone’s life. We now have a positive word for this experience: eustress. The peace of God is not the comfortable avoidance of all stress. True peace has room enough for all kinds of difficulties.

from A Man’s Approach to God by Richard Rohr

"Father’s Day Cards"

"Father’s Day Cards"

When I was giving priests’ retreats in Peru, a sister working in the main prison in Lima told me a story I have never forgotten. She said as Mother’s Day was approaching, the prisoners kept asking for Mother’s Day cards. She brought card after card so they could write to Mama. As Father’s Day approached she decided to be better prepared. She brought in an entire care of Father’s Day cards, so she could give them to the prisoners when they asked. She told me that case is still sitting in her office because no one asked for a Father’s Day card. She couldn’t give them away. My friend looked at me with tears in her eyes because she understood the source of so much suffering. She realized so many of the men were in prison because they had never been told who they were, they had never been believed in by a man. So they moved into a violent and false masculinity, the destructive masculinity that occurs when one’s manhood is not affirmed by other men. I wonder if the jails and prisons of the world would not be much empties if young boys had true mentors, guides and fathers to bless them and initiate them into manhood.

from A Man’s Approach to God by Richard Rohr

"The Rise of Fundamentalism"

"The Rise of Fundamentalism"

The foundation of fundamentalism is fear. When people feel distance from the Father, they may feel they can’t trust him because he is hard and out to get them. When they believe they can’t please the Father, they get into what the Church has so often gotten into, in almost every denomination, the merit/demerit system. They need to make sure they are right with the distant Father. In Catholicism it takes the form of legalism and near idolatry of the institution. In Protestantism, at least today, it takes the form of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism creates a system of words, bible quotes and techniques for salvation that are supposedly certain, so you can always know the ground on which you stand and keep the feared Father on your side. It’s very popular today in America, and wherever else the family system is collapsing and fathers are absent or abusive. I would say that people who are attracted to fundamentalism are suffering from a lack of masculine energy, a lack of union with the Father. When you are in union with the Father, you don’t need petty certitudes to overcome your fear. You can relax with God; you can even feel free to make mistakes. You resonate with the words of the Father, “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased,” and such perfect love casts out all fear (1 John 4:18).

from A Man’s Approach to God by Richard Rohr

Wax Wings

"Wax Wings"

Our shadow is somehow the other side of our gift. If Mercury is our gift-image, I guess I would have to say that Icarus is our shadow-image. As you may remember, Icarus is the other mythological son with wings, but his inflated self-image leads him to fly too close to the sun, revealing and melting the wax that holds his wings together. His pride, his non-listening, his false self-assurance are shown forth as he crashes into the sea. In our case, Icarus is the American Catholic Church that is more American than Catholic, more individualistic than communitarian, more anti-authoritarian than authoritative, more psychological than radically gospel, more into freedom of choice than the real and discliplined freedom of the children of God. The wax of such wings is sure to melt because it is not gospel. Our shadowy tendencies are very difficult to describe and very hard not to be defensive about. I ask you to pray for the grace and gift of ego-detachment, so we can all move to a wider and wiser place where the future of the Amercian Catholic Church can reveal itself.

from “The Future of the American Church”

"Reclaiming Authority"

"Reclaiming Authority"

I believe the Catholic Church in America has the gift and the potential to redeem the intuitive Catholic respect for authority and to rediscover its base and power. There is no evidence in the Scriptures or in the founding and renewing of religious orders that God works outside or against the function of authoritative leadership. In fact, the recent histories of religious life say that there are no examples whatever of religious orders being founded or refounded by chapters, votes, groups, discussions, mission statements or anything other than individuals with an intrinsically authoritative vision and call. We call them charisms. I suggest that we refine and educate our awareness of charism, particularly the charism of leadership.

Richard Rohr, from “The Future of the American Church”

"The Church in America"

"The Church in America"

The overriding gift of the Catholic Church in America is that it is honestly in search of authentic spiritual authority. That may seem rather strange for a people who want to consider themselves free-thinking, self-determined and highly democratic people. And yet that is probably the very reason we are on such a desperate search. Our very individualism has given us a profound need for Someone else to trust. Our self-centered life-styles drive us back to a center that is in fact the Center. Our freedom from kings, popes and dictators leaves us free to desire a worthy Lordship. Maybe we say it differently than the past tradition would have, but we would not fuss and bother with all of these miters and tiaras if we did not deeply desire a true spiritual authority that could truly unite us around common values, virtues and common good. Obviously and rightly it is a longing for God. Our fierce independence and healthy mistrust of authority for its own sake put our American Church into a position to help the universal Church uncover and trust real spiritual authority. That authority is based in inherent truth and radical gospel – instead of limited appeals to right, power philosophy and parental put-downs like, “Because I said so, that’s why!” The spiritual authority that the Church in America seeks is pragmatic authority that achieves its purpose. We cannot trust authority that claims to speak for God but does not achieve spiritual ends: Does it heal, forgive, reconcile, mend, restore, renew, enliven, awaken, integrate and validate the deepest human intuitions? Does it renew marriage relationships, does it reconcile countries, does it fill people with real hope and tangible joy? Is it an authority that is capable of self-criticism and seeking Kingdom values beyond self-congratulation and self-preservation? If not, I see no reason why I should trust it or surrender my only life to it. As Jesus clearly taught us, we could distinguish the true and false prophets by one simple criterion: their fruits. The American Catholic is too independent, honest and commonsense to bow before ascribed and acquired authority when it is not also real authority. And what is real authority? Leadership (and I do believe in the right and necessity of leadership!) and membership both owe one another holiness. That is the full authority of the Body of Christ.

Richard Rohr, from “The Future of the American Church”

"Centered People"

"Centered People"

The greatest gift of centered and surrendered people is that they know themselves as part of a larger history, a larger self. In that sense, centered people are profoundly conservative, knowing that they only stand on the shoulders of their ancestors and will be open and reformist because they have no private agendas or self-interest to protect. People who have learned to live from their center know which boundaries are worth maintaining and which can be surrendered. Both reflect an obedience. If you want a litmus test for truly centered people, that’s it: They are always free to obey reality, to respond to what is.

from Radical Grace, “Center and Circumference”

"Acting Versus Reacting"

"Acting Versus Reacting"

Most people I’ve known in my lifetime react, they do not act. They spend their whole life reacting to circumstances and always consider themselves the victim of circumstances. Seldom do you see anybody choosing: This is what I want my life to be, and this is the ten-year plan to where the family is going to go. It was so inspiring to me when some of our young families of the New Jerusalem Community did just that: They decided to hold their level of consumerism in their family at their 1975 salary or whatever it might have been. They decided that was enough to live a comfortable life and any raises that came after that would just be icing. They wouldn’t add to their consumption; they would find more ways to be generous and give it away. Now those are people with direction, with purpose, who are living out of real gospel values, not reacting but acting, choosing, deciding.

Richard Rohr, from A Man’s Approach to God

"Masculine Energy"

"Masculine Energy"

The deep masculine is love for the truth like the love of John the Baptist. You love the truth no matter what the price of it is, no matter how many you displease. You stand by your principles even if you don’t get promoted or rewarded, applauded or hugged, even if you are a lone voice crying in the wilderness. John is shouting the truth in the desert, frankly because no one in civil society will listen to him. It’s how a lot of people felt during the Persian Gulf War. If we don’t have a lot of truth-speakers in our country, or in our Church, I think it can in part be explained by the lack of masculine energy – this lack of determination to go with what you have got to go with, pay the price for it and let the cards fall where they may. Many more women than men have this energy, especially in the Church.

from A Man’s Approach to God

"Mellow Seventy-Year-Olds"

"Mellow Seventy-Year-Olds"

I hope you have met a man who has become one of those mellow seventy-year-olds. I’ve met a few, not enough really. It’s a shame we expect people in their seventies to be crotchety and set in their ways; it should be just the opposite. When you have met him, you know you have met a great person. He’s the real image of the grandfather or wise man, who can sit on the edge of the family and offer it security and caution. He doesn’t stifle others with closedness and rigidity, dogmatic political opinions, or an Archie Bunker worldview. Rather, he offers a worldview in which we will feel both safe and adventurous. Because most fathers don’t have that kind of grandfather around, they bear the whole burden of life alone. They end up eventually becoming crotchety grandfathers themselves, and move to a better climate to find the sunshine. We have to change this whole cycle. There has to be a different way. No civilization has survived spiritually unless the elders saw it as their central task to pass on wisdom to the young.

from Richard Rohr, A Man’s Approach to God

"The Four Stages of a Man’s Life"

"The Four Stages of a Man’s Life"

People in India recognize four stages of male life. The first stage is student, where one is a learner and takes in life. The second stage is the householder, where he marries, raises children and learns to love and be faithful to his wife. We Westerners for some strange reason consider this second stage to be the whole deal and the end of all life. People spend the remainder of their life fixing up the house, waiting for their children and then grandchildren to come home and visit them. The third stage is called the seeker, or forest dweller. This is one who, after raising a family, takes them and moves beyond the nuclear family to a bigger world picture. The question for most Americans today is, Who is going to get me a job next week? Who can keep the economy going next month? That’s how farsighted we are, that’s how big of a global consciousness we have. We’re not connected to the rest of the world; we’re not connected to anything except next week. It’s hedonistic, it’s a-historical, it’s spiritually blind, and it keeps all of us from the fourth stage; the wise man, who puts the inner life together with the outer life, the small family together with the big family. Mahatma Ghandi personified this male journey. The sage, or wise man, thinks globally but lives and acts locally.

from A Man’s Approach to God

"The Flotsam of Feelings"

"The Flotsam of Feelings"

The life of prayer is the primary school of the Spirit. What we’re doing in prayer is not creating successes; we’re waiting upon the Lord. We’re tuning into the stream of life and waiting to let that stream unburden itself of distractions and baggage. If you don’t keep jumping on those ships that cross our minds during prayer, if you don’t over-identify with the flotsam bobbing down the stream, they stop returning. Try it. If you’ve identified all your life with your feelings and your opinions, that flotsam will keep coming by and expect you to jump on it. Stop doing that for awhile. It’ll come by a second time and say, “Maybe you didn’t see me the first time. Here I am. I am the relationship to always get angry about. I want you to get angry again so you can waste the rest of your morning.” And this time you look at it and say, “I don’t need you. Float on by.” Don’t fight it. That’s very important. We were trained to fight distraction. Yet there is no such thing as a distraction; everything is data. Look at it and then see if you can stay on the bank of the stream and name the feeling, feel the feeling and let it go by. It’ll probably come by even a third time, maybe even a fourth or fifth, if you’ve indulged this feeling for years. But after a while you notice that it stops floating by in the stream of consciousness. “I’m not going anywhere with him! I’m not going to get anywhere with her. She’s not going to feed me.” And then you’ll get to the holy place, beyond feelings, beyond opinions, beyond the passing world: the place where all things are One.

from Preparing for Christmas With Richard Rohr

"Our Identity in Christ"

"Our Identity in Christ"

You have died, and now the life you have is hidden with Christ in God. But when Christ is revealed – and he is your life – you too will be revealed in all your glory with him. (Colossians 3:3-4, JB)

Can you move below the surface to who you are objectively? That’s what our Baptism was meant to announce to us: our identity in Christ. We are called to move back to that place of our identity in Christ – who we really are – whether we’ve done a single thing right our whole life. We hear about it in the story of the good thief. He had done everything wrong with his life. But at the moment of encounter with Christ, he was able to affirm a place of union and a place of identity, a place of trust. The Lord says, “Because you’re living out of that place, you’re already in paradise.” What a challenge to our notions of holiness! Right behavior does not necessarily lead to true identity, but true identity will eventually produce right behavior. The first looks like holiness; the second is.

from Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr

"God Isn’t a Twosome Off in a Corner"

"God Isn’t a Twosome Off in a Corner"

A relationship between two people, a true giving and receiving, becomes something that almost stands apart from the persons themselves. They can talk about their relationship. They can let other people in on their relationship and give their relationship to other people. That’s precisely what a mother and father should do for their child. Children who receive that gift are the healthiest and most secure children. I tell young people who are considering life together, I want you no to hoard your relationship. Give it to the community. Draw others into that space between you, into the way you relate, the enjoyment you have, the experiences you have. Don’t always just be a twosome off in the corner. God isn’t a twosome off in the corner. There is enough space between the giving of the Creator and the Redeemer to let all of the cosmos in between, and that’s us, the Church. The Church is what’s created in the give and take between the Father and the Son. That’s the first creed of the Church: The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and we exist in the passion of that exchange. Think about that – forever.

Richard Rohr from The Price of Peoplehood

"Standing In-Between"

"Standing In-Between"

Thanks be to God, the Catholic Church has produced more martyrs in the last twenty years than we did in the first two hundred years of the Church. Wherever I go on this earth, there are the Catholic missionaries, standing between left and right, standing between communism and capitalism, simply trying to be faithful to Jesus and the gospel. They spill their blood, invariably, because both the right and the left hate them. They’re not playing either side’s games. They are building bridges, but you can’t build a bridge from the middle. You have to start on one side, and for Christians that starting place is on the side of the poor and powerless. That pleases no one, really – not even liberals. That’s the position we’re in today. I call it the naked position of the gospel: where you don’t please the liberals or conservatives, you simply are faithful to the gospel. It is asking more of our minds and our hearts than any of us are prepared for.

Richard Rohr form Letting go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

"Happy Fault"

"Happy Fault"

We don’t think ourselves into a new way of living; we live ourselves into a new way of thinking. The journeys around the edges of sin lead us to long for a deeper life at the center of ourselves. Ruthless ambition can lead one to the very failure and emptiness that is the point of conversion. Is the ambition therefore good or is it evil? Do we really have to sin to know salvation? Call me a “sin mystic,” but that is exactly what I see happening in all my pastoral experience: Darkness leads us to light. That does not mean that we should set out intentionally to sin. We only see the pattern after the fact. Blessed Julian of Norwich put it perfectly: “Commonly, first we fall and later we see it – and both are the Mercy of God.” How did we ever lose that? It got hidden away in that least celebrated but absolutely central Easter Vigil service when the deacon sings to the Church about a felix culpa, the happy fault that precedes and necessitates the eternal Christ. Like all great mysteries of faith, it is hidden except to those who keep vigil and listen.

from Richard Rohr, Radical Grace, “Center and Circumference”

"Poverty Defined: The Poverty of Being Human"

"Poverty Defined: The Poverty of Being Human"

The fourth and final poverty described in the Bible is the poverty of being human. This is the poverty of being human. This is the ideal poverty of Scripture. Jesus became human yet never sinned because he never rejected this level of poverty. He never rejected the limitations of the human scene, never fought or railed against it. He was happy to “empty himself…and become as humans are” (Philippians 2:7). It’s a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness. That’s my best definition of Christian maturity. It’s very hard for and affluent culture to accept a limited world, and that’s why Jesus said the rich person cannot easily enter into the Kingdom of God (Matthew 19:23, Mark 10:23, Luke 18:24). I meet many holy priests who are recovering alcoholics. I can almost pick them out by now; there’s a kind of littleness from the very beginning, a kind of vulnerability, a relaxed-ness with themselves and with one another. They’re not living in their heads anymore. They had to face, at one point in their lives, their littleness, their poverty. They had to wake up one day and say, I’m an alcoholic. They are some of the greatest priests I meet. Humility and human come from the same Latin word, humus, dirt. A human being is someone, as we are reminded on Ash Wednesday, taken out of the dirt. A humble person is one who recognizes that and even rejoices in it! When Carl Jung was toward the end of his life, a student who was reading the classic book The Pilgrim’s Progress asked him what his pilgrim’s progress had been. Jung said, “I have had to climb down ten thousand ladders so that at the end of my life I can reach out the hand of friendship to this little clod of earth that I am.” That’s the poverty of spirit that Jesus chose and that he calls “blessed.” It’s his very first statement in his Great Sermon and his very last action on the cross.

Richard Rohr, from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction