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I think most everyone can relate to that, if you’re a stay-at-home mom or dad, or if you’re a CEO of a company, or if you’re a banker or a teacher. It’s like the work is never done, the needs are always before us. And so then how are we to respond? Contemplative spirituality has really helped me to find that anchor and that rootedness in the daily presence of God. It’s just not easy to be human.

Phileena Heuertz: It’s not easy to be human | Faith & Leadership (via mshedden) (via ifiblogged)

Decisions that stand in opposition to the status quo are not for the faint-hearted; they require courage, honesty and risk. These kinds of decisions release us into our destiny. Abundant life awaits each of us, but we must die to obtain it. The challenge is to understand which part of us must die and which part is dying to be raised to life. Until we have grown sufficiently in self-knowledge, it is difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish the false self from the true. I had to die not only to the status quo but to repressive attachments that shackled me in a posture of inferiority and subordination so that I could live and reflect the truth of who God made me to be. This meant dying to my old way of being so that I could live into the responsibility of proper self-assertiveness.

Phileena Heuertz, ‘Pilgrimage of a Soul,’ page 116. (via ifiblogged)

Those at the edge of any system and those excluded from any system, ironically and invariably hold the secret for the conversion and wholeness of that very group. They always hold the feared, rejected, and denied parts of the group’s soul. You see, therefore, why the church was meant to be that group that constantly went to the edges, to the “least of the brothers and sisters,” and even to the enemy. Jesus was not just a theological genius, but he was also a psychological and sociological genius. When any church defines itself by exclusion, it is always wrong. It is avoiding its only vocation, which is to be the Christ.

Only as the People of God receive the stranger, the sinner, and the immigrant, those who don’t play our game our way, do we discover not only the hidden, feared, and hated parts of our own souls, but the fullness of Jesus himself. We need them for our own conversion.

The Church is always converted when the outcasts are re-invited back into the temple. You see this in Jesus’ commonly sending marginalized people that he has healed, back into the village, back to their family, or back to the temple to “show themselves to the priests.” It is not just for their re-inclusion and acceptance, but actually for the group itself to be renewed.

Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 28, day 27