{"id":16552,"date":"2018-03-20T09:45:08","date_gmt":"2018-03-20T13:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=16552"},"modified":"2018-03-20T09:45:24","modified_gmt":"2018-03-20T13:45:24","slug":"thisness-75-years-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=16552","title":{"rendered":"Thisness &#8211; 75 Years of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Thisness Richard Rohr\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>75 Years of Life<\/p>\n<p>Tuesday, March 20, 2018<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PFJZNgc8uoA\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n(Spring Equinox)<br \/>\nI was born 75 years ago today. I know 75 is a somewhat arbitrary number, yet our culture has assigned it some significance. CAC staff encouraged me to share my journey, and they sifted through old photo albums to illustrate my very human path. So today I offer a few reflections from my own \u201cparticular\u201d life. I hope you, too, can see in your life your own unique manifestation of the image and likeness of God, each of us \u201ccrying what I do is me: for that I came\u201d in Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2019 words.<br \/>\nIn 1943, in the midst of World War II, it cost Mom and Dad exactly $44.19 to birth me at St. Francis (auspicious!) Hospital in Topeka, Kansas. The immediate circumcision then cost another full $2.00. I received my first initiation rite very inexpensively indeed! It seems like Mom was much more initiated than I was in her many hours of labor.<br \/>\nMy parents laminated the check they wrote to pay the bill for my birth; I still have it and look at it with soft joy. The entire amount\u2014$46.19\u2014covered a week in the hospital, during which I had full nursing and cuddling privileges from Mom and extracurricular care from a whole staff of Sisters of Charity in angelic white habits. No wonder I am so spoiled and like to think I am God\u2019s favorite!<br \/>\nDaddy wrote at the bottom of the check \u201cBaby Dickie.\u201d He did not want me called Junior, since he had given me his own name of Richard. So I was always known as Dickie at home and by close friends throughout the years.<\/p>\n<p>Long Description<br \/>\nI had a very happy boyhood in Kansas\u2014right down the road from Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz\u2014building forts, rafts, and treehouses. I spent idyllic summers on my cousins\u2019 farm in Ellis County, which was boring flat land to most people. There I first learned to love and honor animals.<\/p>\n<p>Long Description<br \/>\nI always enjoyed growing things and watching sunsets across the Great Plains. We boys would jump stark naked into golden silos of grain, screaming with delight. (I hope you did not eat any Kansas bread made anywhere around 1953!) I would often lie on a soft patch of green grass at night and look at the stars in wonder. I called this my \u201cBeautiful Spot,\u201d a place too sacred and intimate for me to talk about until now.<br \/>\nI was a \u201cB\u201d student in school because I usually wrote down my thoughts rather than what the teachers actually said. This was even more true at Duns Scotus College in Michigan where I studied philosophy for four years and at St. Leonard College in Ohio (affiliated with the theology department of the University of Dayton). My young Franciscan professors had brought back the latest biblical and theological scholarship from European universities. Many were in Rome during the momentous Second Vatican Council, and they passed onto their pupils what they learned and experienced. We were not so much taught theological conclusions as the process of getting there. I received a full history of the development of Christian ideas more than Catholic apologetics.<br \/>\nLittle did I imagine how this would affect my entire life and my own approach to theology. The inspired documents of Vatican II put the Gospel back at the center of our lives, just as St. Francis tried to do. This made spirituality so much more alive and real than the narrow churchiness I grew up with\u2014and that many are still taught to this day. After the fearful reaction to Vatican II in these past decades, I\u2019m grateful to have lived to see Pope Francis, who convinces me of the wonderfully crooked lines of God. How did he ever get elected? Pope Francis is showing us all that God\u2019s full life, just like nature, is never a straight line and never a dead end.<br \/>\nI was ordained in 1970 in my home parish in Topeka. The church was built on the spot where the Pentecostal movement began in 1900; the first recorded modern phenomenon of speaking in tongues was heard there on New Year\u2019s Eve of 1901. The old mansion was soon called \u201cStone\u2019s Folly\u201d and the Pentecostals left Kansas for Azusa Street in Los Angeles, where folks were more accustomed to other languages than English. Images from the first Pentecost (fire, which no one controls, and wind, which seems to come from nowhere) reveal the wildness of the Spirit that has guided and driven my life\u2014with plenty of resistance on my part\u2014all of these wonderful years.<\/p>\n<p>Long Description<br \/>\nA woman held up the receiving line after my ordination ceremony to tell me a local Pentecostal story. I was irritated; she was interfering with my centrality and many others were in line. I tried to hurry her along, but nevertheless she persisted. And by she, I mean both this particular woman and the Holy Spirit\u2014who has never given up on me. The Spirit has always persisted in drawing and pushing me, despite my many personal limitations, my unfaithfulness with what was given to me, and the many times I passionately believed my own message while also denying it in practice.<\/p>\n<p>Long Description<br \/>\nThe Good News has always been too good to be true and too big to be absorbed by \u201cme,\u201d my small and separate self. My trials were mostly interior, intellectual, spiritual, relational, and emotional \u201ccliffs of fall,\u201d as poet Hopkins called them. A few cancer scares, my recent heart attack, hate letters, and cruel accusations over the years were a walk in the park in comparison. (I\u2019m currently going through cardiac rehab\u2014and hopefully taking good care of my heart\u2014any way that you want to understand that!) I\u2019m deeply grateful for God\u2019s patience and tenderness with my self-doubt and insecurity during all this time. I wish I could always be the same with others.<br \/>\nThis one Holy Spirit has moved through all of us over time\u2014creating the Franciscans and the Second Vatican Council for Catholics, the Baptism in the Spirit for many Protestants, deep mystical movements in all faith traditions, and a growing recognition, as St. Thomas Aquinas often wrote, \u201cIf something is true, no matter who said it, it is always from the Holy Spirit.\u201d [1] In time, I could not help but see the many faces of Christ and the Spirit in serene Hindus, native peoples in love with the natural world, my socially conscious Jewish friends, profound Buddhist wisdom, Sufi God-lovers, and, of course, in loving Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants of every stripe, often in spite of their denomination or theology rather than because of it.<\/p>\n<p>Long Description<br \/>\nLike the wind, the Spirit blows where it will (John 3:8). There has been more than enough wind at my back\u2014and more than enough seeing and encountering of Love\u2014for all of these 75 years. All of it was given, never acquired, merited, or even fully understood. I just stumbled into Love again and again. And was held by it.<br \/>\nThis is entirely true for you, too. I know you are part of this same windstorm, this same seeing, or you would not have bothered to read this short memoir. I am so glad that we have been on this same earth at this same wonderful and terrible time. I humbly thank you for your trust.<\/p>\n<p>___________________________________________________<\/p>\n<div class=\"row title-row\">\n<div class=\"row\">\n<div class=\"utmost-devo-title col col-sm-12 col-xs-12\">\n<h2 class=\"entry-title\">Friendship with God<\/h2>\n<h4>By <a href=\"https:\/\/utmost.org\/oswald-chambers-bio\">Oswald Chambers<\/a><\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"clearfix\"><strong>Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing\u2026? \u2014<\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?version=31&amp;search=Genesis+18%3A17\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Genesis 18:17<\/strong><\/a><\/div>\n<div class=\"row entry-meta\">\n<div class=\"col-sm-4\">\n<div class=\"top-sharing\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"top-rule\"><\/div>\n<section class=\"entry-content\">\n<div class=\"post-content\">\n<p><strong>The Delights of His Friendship.<\/strong> Genesis 18 brings out the delight of true friendship with God, as compared with simply feeling His presence occasionally in prayer. This friendship means being so intimately in touch with God that you never even need to ask Him to show you His will. It is evidence of a level of intimacy which confirms that you are nearing the final stage of your discipline in the life of faith. When you have a right-standing relationship with God, you have a life of freedom, liberty, and delight; you <em>are<\/em> God\u2019s will. And all of your commonsense decisions are actually His will for you, unless you sense a feeling of restraint brought on by a check in your spirit. You are free to make decisions in the light of a perfect and delightful friendship with God, knowing that if your decisions are wrong He will lovingly produce that sense of restraint. Once he does, you must stop immediately.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Difficulties of His Friendship.<\/strong> Why did Abraham stop praying when he did? He stopped because he still was lacking the level of intimacy in his relationship with God, which would enable him boldly to continue on with the Lord in prayer until his desire was granted. Whenever we stop short of our true desire in prayer and say, \u201cWell, I don\u2019t know, maybe this is not God\u2019s will,\u201d then we still have another level to go. It shows that we are not as intimately acquainted with God as Jesus was, and as Jesus would have us to be\u2014 \u201c\u2026that they may be one just as We are one\u2026\u201d (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=John+17:22\">John 17:22<\/a>). Think of the last thing you prayed about\u2014 were you devoted to your desire or to God? Was your determination to get some gift of the Spirit for yourself or to get to God? \u201cFor your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him\u201d (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Matthew+6:8\">Matthew 6:8<\/a>). The reason for asking is so you may get to know God better. \u201cDelight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart\u201d (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Psalm+37:4\">Psalm 37:4<\/a>). We should keep praying to get a perfect understanding of God Himself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thisness Richard Rohr\u00a0 75 Years of Life Tuesday, March 20, 2018 (Spring Equinox) I was born 75 years ago today. I know 75 is a somewhat arbitrary number, yet our culture has assigned it some significance. CAC staff encouraged me to share my journey, and they sifted through old photo albums to illustrate my very [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16552"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16553,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16552\/revisions\/16553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}