Mike Paschall . com

Mystical moments may be described as a kind of emancipation. If it isn’t an experience of newfound 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.

From Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate…

Seeing God in All Things (CD, DVD, MP3)

Richard Rohr, O.F.M

I am not proud of my spiritual markers of development when I was a younger man. Too often the fruit of my labors and thought and projected ego was completely devoid of any notion or influence of love. People were to be impressed, herded, and overtly objectified by my mission to serve God. It pains me at some level still, but somehow I missed that relating to all three persons of the Trinity should have been producing an ever-growing capacity for love and preference for those who were also created from the same place I was. The memo was clear enough. I just didn’t get it.

Although I am no final authority for anyone, I must say for my own benefit that we who define and declare ourselves “followers of God” must evaluate whether we are ever expanding in our capacity to exude love towards our brothers and sisters who share time and space on this glorious globe. Are we ever growing in practical expressions of love, or do we hinder our development by continuing to simmer in a justified isolation that only moves toward what looks, acts, or thinks like me? Yes, that includes our religious preferences, practices, and ideas.

It seems that the majority of us have been trained from birth to be exclusively tribal and loving towards those who identify with our biases and bents. We’ve made some strides, but there are days where I wonder if we’ve become more rigid about who gets our nods of approval. Our God’s love is for ALL of His creation. That includes you, me, and everyone else. It’s probably time we minor in what is minor and major in what is major. I’m convinced that expanding our capacity to LOVE is major.

Live every day inside this magnificent truth: GOD LOVES US ALL!

Mike