Thoughts from Rohr

"Jesus always ate with the 'wrong people'

One could say Jesus was crucified because of who he ate with—he rewrote social order, and it upset the church and the state."

"Silence is a life of its own. An ontological identity. That which precedes all things. Abide in this different phenomenon. Words, events, relationships, identities become rather superficial, lose meaning."

"Silence is the ground of all words.

Beauty emerges in the silence around it. Empty Space. Emptiness becoming its own fullness; Silence. Faith and Silence are practicing for death, and realizing it's okay."

"Silence is just as important as our time together. Silence is a substance, a reality in itself. Extended silence... things find their true order naturally.

"Emotions are emptiness... we give our lives to emotions when emotions have no substance, they add nothing to us."

"Either you see God in all things, or you see God in nothing.

People chase speed sound and mass when they don't have meaning, significance, silence.

Silence is an ever faithful companion, a portal to constantly deeper connection with whatever is in front of you, a stone, a worm, a tree.

It doesn't need to be big or important any more. Anything can convert you once you surround it with a reverent silence that gives it significance, identity, singularity, importantance, value.

Dun Scotus, Franciscan philosophy: “Thisness” of everything.

God doesn't create genus, species, he only creates this, you, you you , me, this frog, cat, this moment... the fact this frog is persisting in being in the moment means God is choosing it to live, or it would fall into an oblivion.

Silence helps horizontally... connect us with all things in our earth, and vertically... helps us connect with spiritual. Silence attracts meaning, poetry. In silence... everything became real, everything needed to be a poem. Life was no longer about the next thing, or about knowing, but about being present.

How you do anything is how to do everything. How you do in this moment is how you do in the next moment. Give each moment the power to change, influence you. Give a man, animal, emotion, event the power to change you. Be vulnerable, intimate with the moment. That vulnerability with the moment is the name of spirituality... live in that way of being: semi-permeably membrane:

Allow events in, allow yourself out. That space where they meet is silence. There are no quick answers, names for things."

* 

“Once you stop seeing divine in one link, the whole thing falls apart. Stop deciding where God is—he is everywhere. You either believe that or you believe he is nowhere. The church has spent the last 500 years deciding where he is and where he isn't and Christians essentially gave birth to secularism by creating divisions between where God is and where he isn't... they essentially created agnostics... by not appreciating silence, the grace-glue that holds everything together, by not honouring the place of silence in the world. Silence allows the whole, it doesn't get lost or identify with any one thing. Without silence, almost all things are boring, and we become preoccupied with size, mass, sound, celebrity, influence, you don't become preoccupied with meaning or significance.”

Therefore, I think with silence one can no longer be concerned with their appearance, their shape, their sound, but with their meaning. God gives man meaning, creating them in his image (and in return, perhaps man gives God meaning by perceiving him, knowing him).

To Emily Dickenson every common bush is in flames. One could say, “Why is God so silent?” but Emily who sees God in everything could only say, “Shut up God, you're so loud!”