Freedom for Love

Freedom for Love   

Mystical moments may be described as a kind of emancipation. If it isn’t an experience of new found freedom, I don’t think it is an authentic God experience. God is always bigger than you imagined or expected or even hoped for. When you see people going to church and becoming smaller instead of larger, you have every reason to question whether the practices or sermons or sacraments or liturgies are opening them to an authentic God experience.

On a practical level such experiences will feel like a new freedom to love, and you wonder where it comes from. Why do I have this new desire, this new capacity to love new people, to love the old people better, maybe to enter into some kind of new love for the world? I will find that even my thoughts are more immediately loving, patient, and compassionate.

Clearly, you are participating in a Love that’s being given to you. You are not creating this. You are not generating this. It is being generated through you and in you and for you. You are participating in something larger than yourself, and you are just allowing it and trusting it for the pure gift that it is.

Adapted from Following the Mystics Through the Narrow Gate
. . . Seeing God in All Things, by Fr. Richard Rohr

Note: I am a big fan of Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk and Roman Catholic priest, and I've been promising for some time to share some of his ideas with Garrett. I decided the best way to do it is to publish some of Fr. Rohr's daily meditations on our blog for everyone. We might even want to discuss them at our meetings!