Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens.
Interpretation
Preparing your heart through spiritual practices allows you to face difficult times with an open heart.
This quote by Richard Rohr emphasizes the importance of cultivating a strong and open heart through faith, prayer, grace, mercy, love, and forgiveness. It suggests that by preparing ourselves spiritually, we can better navigate life's challenges, allowing us to maintain compassion and openness even during our most trying times.
In practice
A motivational speaker could use this quote to inspire resilience in their audience.
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.
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
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.
The mind of a human being is formed only of comparisons made in order to examine analogies, and therefore cannot precede the existence of memory.
A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.
Now every girl is expected to have: Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.
I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.
A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest - but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
Nothing ever gets settled in this town. a seething debating society in which the debate never stops, in which people never give up, including me. And so that's the atmosphere in which you administer.
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