Love is stronger than death.

Love is stronger than death, even stronger than hell.

There is no such thing as the perfect life, the perfect situation, the perfect marriage, the perfect person.

This is not easy to accept, the acceptance of your true self which is revealed to you whenever you put your defenses down.

How long oh Lord? How long will it take for me to completely understand your transforming love for me and for everyone? How long before I can step out into your world and give of my true self and not just my false self? When I believe I have it all together, is really when I have lost the true way which leads to you. So I move down into the abyss of my false self and try to get out of this hole by my own tactics, when all I really should be doing is letting go and letting be and surrendering to your love.

I have been doing this song and dance for over 4 decades, how is it possible to become free of my (false self) and reach out to my (true self) my very own nature ?

Richard Rohr gives us a little peek into the transformed true self. But let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. We will always have both selves, it’s a paradox, we have been given both but the true self, what Richard Rohr calls the “Immortal Diamond” has been buried within. For some deeply buried, for others who have been on the contemplative path a little less but let us not fool ourselves in thinking that once you have found some inklings of your true self, the search is over. It will never be over, it is eternal.

Let’s face reality, most of us are looking for a balanced life, who wants to be “spiritual” without being “human”. Jesus was the Incarnation of God, the true self. You might say perfection but what does it mean to be perfect?

If you were brought up in the 1940’s & 1950’s, you were most likely following the status quo; your parents, their religion, their government. Some of us in the 1960’s & 1970’s tried to break away from the status quo. Many left their vocations, their homeland etc. The search was in full swing. My parents moved our family to Florida in the late 1950’s in pursuit of happiness. At this time I was 16, the oldest. There were 7 children & a brother born in Florida. This move turned out to be very devastating for all of us, it changed the course of our family life.

We can’t run away from our true self, it is always there beckoning for us to pay attention to the little details of our self and they are very subtle, we have done a good job in burying our true self and the longer we deny this true self the longer it will take to resurrect it. Unless like Saint Paul you are given a mystical experience and you turn your whole life around. It’s a good thing that Paul had a strong sense of his false self, he needed this to withstand all the inner suffering that this conversion was calling him to acknowledge.

St. John of the Cross calls this “The Dark Night of the Soul”. Teresa of Avila went through a 20 year period of this darkness, as well as Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Most of the darkness is coming to the understanding of our imperfections, which Saint Therese of Lisieux explains in her autobiography “The Little Way”.

We are not being asked to give up our lives for the sake of the kingdom, we are being nudged to get out of our own way, to give up what is getting in the way of our inner growth. We are dying inside, let us face the darkness, acknowledge that it is there inside all of us and pray for the grace to overcome, to be a resurrected people and to build the city of God.

God has led me to it. He can lead me through it.