A DEEP REVERSE LEADING HIGHER

What the mystics know, and what we’re having to relearn, is that it’s through a kind of luminous darkness of nonattachment and humility that we come to be seized by real love, God’s love....Once we lost a spirituality of darkness as its own kind of light, there just wasn’t much room for growth in faith, hope, and love.  Fr Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, March 13, 2023

I keep rereading that paragraph...trying to absorb a luminous darkness and a spirituality of darkness. I got that rare wedded understanding with my first reading. That is awesome...it clarifies my "mirror image" understanding; i.e., God's will, God's way is spiritually my will, my way...deeply reversed leading higher.   

This opens me...my heart and my mind...to Saint Teresa's The Way of Perfection (by practicing fraternal love, compassion, kindness, etc.). Our experience practicing this Way has been, is, rocky, rough and rutted...leading the reasoning mind to believe we are going in the wrong direction. No. We are going in our new direction...away from self.

We can expect to be God-guided over the rugged road by living our new realization that ego = selfish. 

Substituting the word "selfish" for "ego," which tends to divorce us from our part in it ("ego's fault"), we are humbled into the admission that, sans egoic knowledge or consent, spiritually we have accepted selfish as our own. 

Still more spiritual growth in short: Humbled into admission, acceptance is birthed and transmutes suffering into the Pearl.

Teresa says in one place, it is not that we are happy for the suffering....We are happy for the new level of intimacy with God that the suffering has brought us to.

Thank you.