The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the idea that true understanding of the divine can come from deep, contemplative experiences rather than superficial perceptions.
Richard Rohr's quote suggests that the experience of darkness or suffering can be a transformative gift that leads individuals to a deeper awareness of God's presence. It implies that intellect and sensory experiences are limited in grasping the divine, and it is often in moments of struggle or desolation that one can truly encounter and understand a profound spiritual reality.
In practice
This quote can be used during a spiritual retreat to help participants reflect on their experiences of suffering.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.
If you haven't wept deeply, you haven't begun to meditate.
The sign of the people of bid’ah is that they do not follow the salaf.
The way we use our money is a barometer of our present spiritual condition. Our neglect of the poor illustrates much about where our hearts lie. But even more than that, the way we use our money is an indicator of our eternal destination. The mark of Christ followers is that their hearts are in heaven and their treasures are spent there
People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.
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