…from Richard Rohr:

I want to say a little about purity and about passion. What I mean by purity is singleness of heart, when the head and the heart are working together in a way that allows you to see wholeness, to see from your True Self.

Purity also has to do with appropriate boundaries, protecting the sacred character of intimacy on both sides of a relationship. You have to know the rules and know what they’re trying to protect before you too quickly throw them out. I don’t mean to sound like a prudish old priest, but I’ve worked with young people who have already had so much casual sex that I wonder if it will ever have the power to lead them to the great feast, the great romance, the great union. Sex is all too often an experience of disunion, failure, or entertainment rather than enlightenment.

If the world does not understand purity and its necessity, it seems to me the church has not understood passion and its necessity. Christianity has mostly mistrusted passion and the abandonment, excitement, joy, freedom, playfulness, and enthusiasm that human love can inspire.

Passion is an energy, a drive from within. The French call it elan vital, a creative force. It’s a thirst for union, a thirst for myself, for more of true life. As such, passion surprisingly carries with it some inevitable dissatisfaction. It never lasts and is never enough once you feed on it. Passion constantly creates within you a hole that longs to be filled. In the Christian tradition we call such implanted longing the indwelling Holy Spirit. The Spirit keeps yearning in us for union with more—with ourselves and thus with God. Drawing from her deep experiences in prayer, St. Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510) shared with conviction, “My own me is God! My own me is God!” [1] Passion is a “leading-string of love” drawing us into God (see Hosea 11:3-4).

We must realize that human love (eros) and divine love (agape) are on a continuum; human love and passion prepare us for and lead us to divine love. As Cynthia Bourgeault explains:

The great secret of erotic love—which all true lovers instinctively know and which I believe Jesus also knew—is that agape is in essence transfigured desire. There are not two loves, one agape-based and the other eros-based. Rather, agape is what emerges from the refiner’s fire when that surging desire to cling, possess, consume the object of one’s adoring is subjected to the discipline of kenosis, self-giving love. . . . [K]enosis is an exercise in the pure generosity of standing in the other’s place, discovering what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself—not as much as one’s self, as egoic consciousness always appends, but as the intimate expression of one’s own being. [2]

“My life is not about me. I am about Life,” the mystic comes to believe! Or as Paul put it, “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Gateway to Silence:
We are temples of God.

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Faith or Experience?
By Oswald Chambers

…the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. —Galatians 2:20

We should battle through our moods, feelings, and emotions into absolute devotion to the Lord Jesus. We must break out of our own little world of experience into abandoned devotion to Him. Think who the New Testament says Jesus Christ is, and then think of the despicable meagerness of the miserable faith we exhibit by saying, “I haven’t had this experience or that experience”! Think what faith in Jesus Christ claims and provides— He can present us faultless before the throne of God, inexpressibly pure, absolutely righteous, and profoundly justified. Stand in absolute adoring faith “in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God— and righteousness and sanctification and redemption…” (1 Corinthians 1:30). How dare we talk of making a sacrifice for the Son of God! We are saved from hell and total destruction, and then we talk about making sacrifices!
We must continually focus and firmly place our faith in Jesus Christ— not a “prayer meeting” Jesus Christ, or a “book” Jesus Christ, but the New Testament Jesus Christ, who is God Incarnate, and who ought to strike us dead at His feet. Our faith must be in the One from whom our salvation springs. Jesus Christ wants our absolute, unrestrained devotion to Himself. We can never experience Jesus Christ, or selfishly bind Him in the confines of our own hearts. Our faith must be built on strong determined confidence in Him.
It is because of our trusting in experience that we see the steadfast impatience of the Holy Spirit against unbelief. All of our fears are sinful, and we create our own fears by refusing to nourish ourselves in our faith. How can anyone who is identified with Jesus Christ suffer from doubt or fear! Our lives should be an absolute hymn of praise resulting from perfect, irrepressible, triumphant belief.

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