As I finished up Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, I was laying on the sofa with a raw throat, feeling feverish. I was surrounded by feverish, coughing kids laying next to me, on me, and across from me. And I knew I was in heaven.
The struggle to forgive reality for being exactly what is is right now often breaks us through to nondual consciousness. -Richard Rohr
That is the spirit of Rohr’s book: Recognizing the Kingdom of God is right now. He introduces Jesus from a perspective I first encountered in Breathing Underwater, and builds from there, using primarily scripture, but also the words of the mystics such as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila, and his own ideas.
His object isn’t to convert his reader, just to encourage another way of thinking about the world, so even if you don’t consider yourself religious, this book is a safe place to explore ideas about God without having to feel like you’re being backed into a corner. Yet the book doesn’t shy away from big ideas.
What’s your position on advice? What counts as advice? Do you find yourself peddling your life experience from time to time? Often? Rarely?
I’ve been thinking about this since this past fall. I got home from my trip, brain freshly scrubbed. I wanted everyone to know about my experience. How could I be true to myself and not talk about it?
And then my inner voice shot back, but you should feel that way about Jesus.
Good Friday. The two challenging kids who are usually in school were home. I was scheduled for a night shift. I was dreading the anticipated lost sleep that night, and wondering how I was going to get through the next week with all my little kids home, my oldest home, and my two big girls away visiting family friends.
After I did my second post on what to read with your kids for Black History Month (you can read the first installment here), I started to think about what we adults could be reading. Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings came up when I searched for historical fiction related to slavery in America.
As I started to read it, I got pulled in pretty early on, which is unusual for me – I usually have to warm up to a book, sometimes for a long time, before I really get into it.
When my friend Laurel mentioned Finding Spiritual Whitespace: Awakening Your Soul To Rest, by Bonnie Gray, was next up on her reading pile, I picked up a copy for myself.
Based on the title, I was already on the journey. Plus, I’ve been curious to get a purely Christian perspective on this concept since reading After the Ecstasy, The Laundry, which included Christian ideology alongside other faith traditions.
I’ve introduced a lot of whitespace to my life this year, and I tend to still feel defensive about it. No one really gives me grief about my dance class, but meditation? The first response I often get if I mention that is, “But what do you do while you’re meditating?“
