#ron rolheiser

[nrt43]

Beauty is meant to be honored; we are meant to feel that powerful attraction and pull, including its sexual component. Beauty, of course, is also meant to be respected and not violated.

Ron Rolheiser

[nrt43]

No one religion or denomination has the full and whole truth. God is both infinite and ineffable. For this reason, by definition, God cannot be captured adequately in human concepts and human language. Thus, while our knowledge of God may be true, it is always only partial. God can be truly known, but God cannot be adequately thought. -Ron Rolheiser

[nrt43]

In essence, what [Jesus’ birth] says is that it is not those who sit at the center of things, the powerful, the rich, the famous, the government leaders, the entertainment celebrities, the corporate heads, the scholars and academics, who ultimately sit at the center of life. What [is] deepest and most meaningful inside of life lies in anonymity, unnoticed by the powerful, tenderly swaddled in faith, outside the city.

Ron Rolheiser

[nrt43]

[Joseph, Jesus’ “father,”] shows how a person can be a pious believer, deeply faithful to everything within his religious tradition, and yet at the same time be open to a mystery beyond both his human and religious understanding.

What does one do when God breaks into one’s life in new, previously unimaginable ways? How does one deal with an impossible conception?

In essence what Joseph teaches us is how to live in loving fidelity to all that we cling to humanly and religiously, even as we are open to a mystery of God that takes us beyond all the categories of our religious practice and imagination.

RON ROLHEISER

[burning-lampstand]

“Faith, by definition, implies a paradoxical darkness, the closer we get to God in this life, the more God seems to disappear because overpowering light can seem like darkness.”

[andweremain]

By Ron Rolheiser

[philipchircop]

MARY MAGDALA’S EASTER PRAYER

Here’s a lovely prayer-poem written in the first person singular. It is Mary Magdalene speaking, the apostle to the apostles and the first witness of the resurrection. We celebrate her feast day today, the 22nd of July. 

Imagine you’re standing with her in the garden of resurrection, wondering what happened to the body of Jesus, wondering why and how is it that the tomb is empty. Imagine The Risen One calling you by name and telling you not to cling but to go and tell ... 

I never suspected Resurrection and to be so painful to leave me weeping

With Joy to have met you, alive and smiling, outside an empty tomb

With Regret not because I’ve lost you but because I’ve lost you in how I had you – in understandable, touchable, kissable, clingable flesh not as fully Lord, but as graspably human.

I want to cling, despite your protest cling to your body cling to your, and my, clingable humanity cling to what we had, our past.

But I know that … if I cling You cannot ascend and I will be left clinging to your former self … unable to receive your present spirit.

Poem | Mary Magdala’s Easter Prayer by Ron Rolheiser in Holy Longing (Image, 1999 ) page 166

Image: Mary Magdalen announcing the resurrection to the apostles (St. Albans Psalter, St Godehard's Church, Hildesheim) illuminated manuscripts.  

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_art

[julesofnature]

Too often we are not present to the beauty, love and grace that brims within the ordinary moments of our lives. Bounty is there, but we aren’t.

Ron Rolheiser