Jesus is much more concerned about shaking your foundations, giving you an utterly alternative self image, world image, and God image, and thus reframing your entire reality. Mere inspiration can never do this.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the transformative power of Jesus' teachings, which can alter one's perception of themselves and the world.
Richard Rohr suggests that the essence of Jesus' message is not just about providing inspiration but about fundamentally transforming an individual's understanding of themselves, their worldview, and their relationship with God. This profound shift in perspective is so significant that it reframes one's entire reality, leading to a deeper and more meaningful existence.
In practice
In a sermon discussing personal growth and spirituality.
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 only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.
To bring about destruction by overcrowding, mass starvation, anarchy, the destruction of our most cherished values, there is no need to do anything. We need only do nothing except what comes naturally, and breed. And how easy it is to do nothing
Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.
Two monks sit facing, playing chess on the mountain, The bamboo shadow on the board is dark and clear. Not a person sees the bamboo's shadow, One sometimes hears the pieces being moved.
You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-called personality. That is the prison where you lie.
Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.
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