Rohr on mammon. Comparison

I think the best single-word, familiar synonym for “mammon” in this article is “comparison,” in the sense of “keeping up with the Joneses.”

“Do I need more/better status symbol stuff?”

“I want the best for my children, family, self, etc.”

But as the author explains, it is comparison beyond material. It includes power.

“Am I doing everything I can to get this promotion?”

“Have I not been ambitious enough?”

“Have I set boundaries and spoken my truth?”

And if, in comparison to wealth-lust, power-lust is subtle for you, then this kind of comparison is likely to be also:

“Is s/he more giving than I am? I need to up my game of giving…”

“I’m the one in this household who has worked the hardest to bring home the most.”

“I’m the one in this partnership who does all the house work.”

“I am the one in this extended family who hosts all the holidays.”

“I have sacrificed as much as my partner has, and deserve his/her reciprocity…”

“Don’t I get some points for that?”

And lastly, most perilous of all,…

“I’m a good person morally.”

“I follow God’s Commandments and my religion’s guidelines and practices…”

“Haven’t I done enough to earn God’s mercy, etc.?”

“I haven’t lied to others, my self, or God about all of my secrets that I have stuffed into my Shadow of shame…”

This obsession with comparison, achievement, superiority, etc. is deeply embedded in our culture, so contaminates every corner of our mind. Even what we think are praiseworthy notions, like self-improvement, are about this kind of comparison.

“Be better today than I was yesterday,” seems praiseworthy. But I do not agree. Eventually, even if we start out with all good intentions, self improvement leads to the expectation that others should be improving themselves also. “No, Neil, that’s not true. I am just focused on myself.” Perhaps for now. But I beg you to be honest with yourself.

For nearly all of us poisoned by this cultural mindset, we are honestly at a complete loss if we take away this goal of constant improvement. It’s as if we have no meaning or purpose in life if that is not it.

In closing, here are some quotes from the article; test your self-honesty with them, and perhaps plan a self-improvement goal to shed denial:

“’You cannot serve God and mammon’ (Luke 16:13). Mammon was the god of wealth, money, superficiality, and success.”

“Mammon becomes then a source of disorder because people allow it to make a claim on them that only God can make.”

“To participate in the reign of God, we have to stop counting. We have to stop weighing, measuring, and deserving in order to let love flow through us. The love of God can’t be doled out by any process whatsoever. We can’t earn it. We can’t lose it. As long as we stay in this world of earning and losing, we’ll live in perpetual resentment, envy, or climbing.”

“You cannot move around inside the world of Infinite Grace and Mercy, and at the same time be counting and measuring with your overly defensive and finite little mind.”

“The reign of God is a worldview of abundance. God lifts us up from a worldview of scarcity to infinity. God’s love is nothing less than infinite.”

Never, ever will our expectations of reciprocity satisfy us. There is absolutely universal evidence for this among every human being. If we hold anyone to the standard of performance achievement, even if it is our own self, we will be perpetually disappointed. Denial of that is death. You, I, and our enemies are loved infinitely, passionately, and with no conditions whatsoever; and we did not earn that.

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Neil D. 2021-09-20

I *am* being loved (Richard Rohr & Ilia Delio)

Sometimes when things feel a little grim to me, I forget.

“…we tend to break down and start controlling things: ‘If I go this way, I’m going to get lost. Well, what if it’s wrong? What will happen to me?’ Well, what will happen to you? Something will happen. But guess what? Something’s going to happen whether or not you go… It’s not like we’ve got this, ‘Here’s God; here’s us. God’s just waiting till we get our act together and then we’ll all be well.’ That’s a boring God; that’s not even God. God is alive.” [https://cac.org/love-is-all-there-is-2021-09-16/]

That’s not the Host of the party I’m at.

“We need to unwire ourselves to recognize that the God of Jesus Christ is, you might say, the power beneath our feet, the depth of the beauty of everything that exists, and the future into which we are moving.” [https://cac.org/love-is-all-there-is-2021-09-16/]

I’ve once put it this way:

“’God loves me,’ feels like God — as a third-person subject — is an idealization, or objectification, external to me, out there, elsewhere; and I’m just a passive object. Doesn’t feel right.
‘I am being loved,’ feels more intimate, warm, breathing with aliveness. ‘Am being.’ More present. Has more action. Evokes a sense of arms actively enfolding me, or my head being drawn to rest in a bosom. Passionate, at this moment, in the present…” [More at source]

What a wonderful party, “even when it hurts.”

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Neil D. 2021-09-16

President Biden on abortion and Pope Francis on pastors. Magisterium vs. Magistrate

Are you a facilitator of grace, or an arbiter of grace who charges tolls to enter the party?

Magistrates make judgments. The magisterium is involved in teachings.

Joe Biden disagrees with the Catholic magisterium which teaches that life begins at conception. Some Catholic bishops have cast the judgment that he should therefore be denied the sacrament of Eucharist.

The church he attends released a statement saying it “will not deny the Eucharist to persons presenting themselves to receive it… As Pope Francis recently reaffirmed, communion should be viewed ‘not as a prize for the perfect, but as a powerful medicine and nourishment…’ None of us, whether we stand in the pews or behind the altar, is worthy to receive it. The great gift of the Holy Eucharist is too sacred to be made a political issue.” [see endnote for more of the papal quote]

The relationship between the pope and bishops is sometimes misunderstood as more straightforward than it is. A bishop has a certain autonomy as an equal to the pope. It is very non-trivial for the pope to interfere in an individual bishop’s diocese. It is an interesting parallel to the relationship between federal and state autonomy in the US.

The papal quotation above appears in what is formally called an “exhortation” of the pope to bishops. It is not a “federal” ruling superceding a diocese. Any bishop may still refuse Biden communion. The words of the exhortation are careful not to trod on that autonomy. In a loose sense, regional church governance is of, by, and for more local people (bishops, anyway).

The exhortations of the pope as the “first among equals” have a certain air of greater universal perspective than the views of a local diocese, even if that authority is not necessarily binding.

Below, I share more words which surround the quotation, because, although a bishop may reject them as magistrate of his own diocese, they shed a seriously bright light on the gravity of such a rejection. I am making a point of this because pope Francis is urging the pastors of their flocks not to be misled by an egotistical God-complex by which they may forget their mission as ministers of Christ who – more clear than anything else in the Jesus accounts – railed against religious leaders who put their righteousness about God above the unconditional love God has for each of God’s children.

Nothing could be more damnably hypocritical than a minister of inclusion and nonjudgmental loving mercy to be… exclusive and judgmental.

Above all – ALL – they minister to God’s children, who are God’s children first and foremost. In any judgment of a pastor, that supreme reality must remain… supreme. God is NEVER served by disserving God’s children.

For a Christian magistrate or the magisterium to put the “law” above a single one of God’s children… Whoa, and woe… Such is PRECISELY what the bulk of the canonical gospel accounts have Jesus CONDEMNING! And as he did so, he routinely befriended and engaged and valued individual persons known to be unclean and unworthy under that law.

A *single* child of his Father is infinitely more worthy than any law/religion in its entirety. Christ is a “people person,” not a magistrate. And his teaching (rabbi, master) was consistently about the supremacy of his brothers and sisters – as children beloved unconditionally by their Father – above all else.

This principle of supremacy, however, is not problem-free for us human beings—however well-intentioned we be.

Occasionally, judgment is a necessary evil in the affairs of our state as human beings.

Judgment is a human enterprise which humans have pinned on “god” because we cannot conceive a universe without it.

Some bishops and Catholics may have wished Biden had kept his private beliefs private. That would have created no public conflict. A minister of communion would not have also to be a magistrate about the sanctity of human life beginning at conception. The supremacy of treating Biden as a child of God would thus not be messy.

Sorry to them. God forbid… God’s supremely unconditional love for each of God’s individual children can be a messy affair for those children!

In the Roe v. Wade decision, the justices acknowledged that this was a messy matter of conflict between a fundamental right of personal privacy (freedom and choice) and the interests of the state on behalf of the unborn child. Messy indeed.

They judged in favor of the first interest, but absolutely did NOT deny that unborn children have legal interests also.

Those who pretend that the supremacy of one of these two interests is a settled matter are unfaithful to the excruciation of the justices and everyone involved, and touched by this case – according to the very words of the justices themselves.

Being “pro choice” means being “for choice.” It does not mean that choice is supreme over life. There is no reason someone who is pro choice is not also pro life. Nor is one who is “for life” necessarily against the autonomy of a woman over her body. In fact, those are pretty incompatible dichotomies. Freedom is very much part of life’s beauty.

In the middle of this mess, the justices had to make a decision. They are the pastors in that ministry to their people. I have not examined the context of Biden’s disclosure, but he is a pastor in ministry to his people as well, and he cannot be a suitable minister if he is not honest. Dishonesty is the flaw most condemned about politics.

I cannot imagine anything less humble than believing we are adequate to stand as judges at the doorway into the house of an unconditionally loving God.

What a shock it will be if we are admitted to that house and find there, at the party, not only the children who served as teachers and magistrates, but also atheists, unborn children, the daughters who sent them there in excruciation, divorced and unfaithful spouses, bishops who denied them communion, vile clerics who violated youthful innocence and shattered the lives of God’s children, and convicted murderers who sent adults there. Will they be chatting and dancing with saints and Jesus himself? My, what a mess that will be, indeed. But I don’t see how you can envision anything else based on the story of Jesus’s warmly personal interactions recorded in the gospels! A mess!

Methinks this is the party house about which papa Francis speaks here:

[Chapter 2 of Evangelii Gaudium concludes (emphases added)]:
47.
The Church is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open [NOT sometimes, under certain conditions]… This is especially true of the.. Eucharist… not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.[51] These convictions have pastoral consequences that we are called to consider with prudence and boldness. Frequently, we act as arbiters of grace rather than its facilitators. But the Church is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone…
49. …I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty…, rather than…unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security… caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should…trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many…are living without…friendship with Jesus Christ… More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges …while at our door people are starving… Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37).

{
Excerpts from note [51] …Saint Ambrose…: “I must receive it always,…” …Saint Cyril of Alexandria…: “I examined myself and I found myself unworthy…”
}

Neil D. 9/11 2021

Sucking air. Pressure. Explore You

Do you understand how breathing works? We don’t actually suck air in. We make space, and air pressure forces the air in. Air flows in. We are constructed to live under air pressure near the earth’s surface.

Not only can’t we breathe without air pressure, our ears would burst. Underwater, there’s too much pressure. High in the atmosphere, there is not enough. That’s the purpose for pressurized cabins in airplanes.

We are made to dwell near the surface.

That seems to be where our awareness dwells also. Near the surface, between our conscious and unconscious/subconscious. That seems to be where we breathe easiest.

When we dive too deeply into our subconscious, the pressure hurts our ego-ears.

When we soar too high, we cant get enough oxygen and get dizzy with euphoria.

Fearful of those low or high limits, we nestle into the narrow confines of that about which we can be conscious in a given moment. Moment after moment. Until the moments have amounted to decades.

Sad. Your ego-ears may swell as you descend into your subconscious, but that exploration can transform your unconscious into consciousness, shifting the surface-limit of your awareness, deepening your consciousness atmosphere at the surface; your ears acclimate. If you dove into the deep end before, and it hurt your ears, try to jump in feet first in the shallow end. Or descend the steps to where jubilant children splash fearlessly. But get in, however slowly it takes to acclimate to the chilly water.

Sherpas don’t sprint to Everest’s peak, respecting the perils of the journey. Nor will a helicopter take you there without an oxygen mask. But hike higher at a pace comfortable to the full You, accommodating your ego as your soul walks patiently beside it. Transcend the current limit of your consciousness, and a new awareness-boundary rises with each step.

The thin slice of awareness at the surface of your consciousness will remain shallow without the courage to endure a little discomfort as you rise or fall. But don’t pretend that it won’t be uncomfortable.

Don’t pretend that it won’t feel unnatural, until it feels… natural.

How else can you expect to “know” more fully the very fullness of your nature?

With each step into frontiers, things “suck” a little less, and the pressure feels a little less uncomfortable.

Go there. At your pace.

Before you step, you don’t know what “your” pace is, so you have to step to discover it.

As you step, you can slow as your comfort dictates, while not retreating to comfort. For the boundary of comfort shifts, and that frontier becomes more settled. Then a new frontier awaits for the more comfortable explorer.

Don’t pretend that it won’t feel unnatural, until it feels… natural.

How else can you expect to “know” more fully the very fullness of your enormous nature?
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Neil D. 2021-09-07

Labels. Relationships. Toxic people. Shadows.

If someone calls you “desperate” to have a girlfriend or boyfriend, your reaction is vehement, rigorous, strong, aggressive. Especially if your last break-up involved your ex pinning many labels on you, as reasons for parting.

Why do we react to those labels so strongly? The simple and immediate answer we offer is, “They’re wrong.” If we believe that so deeply and thoroughly, why do we react so strongly?

I may insist strongly that 2+2=5 is wrong, but my righteousness isn’t a defense of my Self.

Our ego lusts to be right. Our ego is our psychic sensor that we are a separate person from others. It senses our INDIVIduality – our sense that we are INDIvisible. Whole. It balances a sense of being connected to a larger collective.

Our ego lusts to be wholly right. Wholly good. Not part desperate.

Our ego subsists in the part of our psyche which is conscious – versus our fuller self. All the other parts of our full self of which we are not conscious, Carl Jung called our “shadow.” It’s part of our whole, but we are not conscious of it.

Labels about us violate our sense of wholeness (or sometimes cultivate it). We are uncomfortable being DIVIded.

Yet, we are a mix of everything that can be put on a list of labels.

Each of us is both good AND bad.

An inflated ego doesn’t like that.

When someone applies a label to us, we want to accept/embrace “good” ones, and reject/defend against bad ones – IN THEIR ENTIRETY.

We don’t like parts of mixes that DIVIde our INDIVIual wholeness.

Responses to “bad” labels can be stronger if such labels open the lid of our repressed Shadow, to expose a glimpse, a peek, at the things in our full Self about which we would prefer to remain unconscious.

When an ex listed labels about you, for why you were parting, none was wrong or incorrect – ENTIRELY.

You honestly couldn’t deny *any* of them – ENTIRELY.

Each label called up parts of your Shadow. Remember, we are largely not conscious of those parts, so we can’t simply call something of which we’re mostly unconscious, wrong.

Your ex was far more conscious of those parts because of the pain those parts caused your ex. As they labeled you, on parting, they had already chosen the ultimate and complete choice of rejection, citing all the reasons you were a bad partner. To them, the list of negative labels was a mountain, and your good labels a mere molehill.

The love that bound you together and kept the scale in favor of your goodness, was gone.

Their labels were partly right and partly wrong.

We ALL are “desperate” for mates because it’s how we are wired by nature. Our tribulation about that label revolves around HOW desperate. A “good” amount of desperate? Or “bad”? Our mix. Our balance.

It’s hard to receive or accept a label like “desperate” with a connotation so negative. Yet we all – each – have some mix from the good and the bad lists. And the mix is never static. Sometimes it changes voluntarily, sometimes consciously; other times it changes unconsciously, or with no choice perceived.

The passage of time is constantly swirling the mix of who we are.

When the mixture hardens, we’re stuck. Or dead. Or a saint outside the realm of humanity.

This is why I’m not comfortable with the absolute rule that we should cut toxic people out of our lives. Yes, I can appreciate that it’s prudent or necessary when we are too unconscious of our Shadow to tolerate the suffering of knowing we are imperfect and weak in the light of our fullness and humanity. At that “sometimes,” we require psychological defenses and “setting boundaries.” But those are steps and phases on a much larger journey, not the stopping point(s).

If we “stop” at a stage of excising toxic people from our lives, won’t we again be a hardened mixture that’s “stuck”?

The boundary of toxicity – who is poison, and who is not – is inside of us. It is drawn by our vulnerability. We are very largely unconscious of it, deny it, avoid it, throw psychological defenses at it, over and over.

Set boundaries and excise toxic people from your life if you must at this “sometime”; but as long as you keep the contents of your Shadow stuffed into unconscious darkness, and you avoid “toxic” people who shine the light of a projector on it, you retard your own growth in awareness about the fullness of who You are.

Both your wholeness and your holes need your whole attention.

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Neil D. 2021-09-05

Brother

Inspired by Brother – Sean of the South…

My brother and I have enjoyed greasy food, cold beer, and live music together. Neither of us plays guitar, likes country music, or have had our mom cry over us and exhort us to fight for our lives against any injury or disease. I’m certain that’s something one can never understand if they haven’t gone through it. Mom is 89 and a 1/2 years old, and she has undertaken that battle more than once; her example speaks loudly, and my younger sisters have “heard” that. They’re my brother too.

To eat, drink, enjoy music and the company of mom, our sisters… well, that’s exhortation enough for me for now.

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Neil D. 2021-09-06