Mike Paschall . com

Like a warm quilted blanket, pull this over yourself. Let it lay still. See if its warmth reaches your heart. -MDP-

Spirituality is about waking up. Eastern religions know this. Spirituality has come upon hard times in the West, where (Bible toting, mean-spirited, right vs wrong, good vs evil, “must be right” thinking) legalism so often took over that we didn’t need spirituality. We lost the spiritual disciplines and tools to know how to remain awake. We lost the disciplines that show us what’s happening, what human relationships mean, the effects of what we do to one another in our relationships.

The Church must continually be taught by the poor. Those who are oppressed and kicked around, who are not beneficiaries of the system, always hold for us the greatest breakthrough-truth and the greatest wisdom. In mythology they are imaged as blind beggars who in fact are true seers.

The same is true inside ourselves. That part of our self that we most hate, that we are most afraid of and most reject, is the poor, oppressed woman or man within. That hated person within holds our greatest gift. We must hold out a preferential option for our own poverty. Our poverty has the key; it offers the breakthrough moment for us to wake up. It’s the hole in the soul, that place where we are radically broken, where we are powerless and therefore open.

Richard Rohr from Breathing Under Water