TO KEEP IT IS TO KILL IT

This is the common temptation to substitute knowledge for actual love or service. --Fr. Richard Rohr

I don't doubt that each of us at some time or other has said or thought essentially that...and that's  not all, we believed it to be original to our self in the saying.

We hear spiritual truth, we like it, but it takes as long as it takes to come to believe it. Then we're there! We believe!! In another heartbeat, we're believing we're doing it. We're not even close...we're a mile and a half closer than we were, but...remember the line, "I've got miles to go before I sleep." There it is.

And that's the good news. Those miles we have to go before we sleep are the fruit on the tree of a loving life. The truth we come to believe is the seed, planted in our heart at birth. Every time we consciously or unconsciously do for another, that seed grows...infinitesimally but it grows.

At some point in our life, an upheaval occurs, coming, as Rohr says, as great love or great suffering. It feels like a personal tsunami within, but it's that little seed having a growth spurt, shedding the old, birthing the new. According to me.

The scales have fallen from our eyes, and we realize that which we knew for truth at a deeper level than we've ever known. We will know it for an authentic spiritual experience when we recognize it as not for us, but for others. That we must needs pass this on...we can only keep it in our life by giving it away.

As we pass it on, we realize that to keep it is to kill it, and our heart, our head and our gut are together at last. And we are at peace.

Thank you.