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.
All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance.
Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that's been taken.
If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.
If I ever reach heaven I expect to find three wonders there: first, to meet some I had not thought to see there; second, to miss some I had expected to see there; and third, the greatest wonder of all, to find myself there.
There is a place in the net where the keeper cannot reach the ball.
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