Still Love

...before you can let go of your ego, you first have to have one!

The ego has an important place and role;

it is simply not the whole story of who you are.

In the larger-than-life people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died--and thus they are larger than death too! Please think about that.

At some point they were led to the edge of their private resources,

and that breakdown, which surely felt like dying,

led them into a larger life.

They went through a death of their various false selves

and came out on the other side knowing that

death could no longer hurt them.

They fell into the Big Love and the Big Freedom--

which many call

God.

Since rites of passage have fallen out of favor in our consumer cultures, many people don't learn how to move past their fear of diminishment, even when it stares them down or gently invites them. I think this lack of preparation for the "passover," our lack of training in grief work and letting go, and our failure to entrust ourselves to a bigger life, is the basis and core of our culture's spiritual crisis.

All great spirituality is about letting go.

Instead we have made it to be about taking in, attaining, performing, winning, and succeeding. True spirituality mirrors the paradox of life itself. It trains us in both detachment and attachment: detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. But if we do not acquire good training in detachment, we may attach to the wrong things, especially our own self-image and its desire for security.

Initiation is one's initial training in an essential letting go,

in order to allow oneself to be reconstructed on a new foundation.

Reality is God's greatest ally.

Full Reality always relativizes us in a most essential way. Such an initiation into death, and therefore into life, rightly "saves" a person. Catholics call it the paschal mystery or the passion of the Christ.

The word passion (patior) means to "allow" or "suffer reality."

It is not a doing,

but a being done unto.

 (like grief)

Union with God,

union with what is--

that is to say, union with everything--

has always been the final goal of any initiatory experience.

One taste of the Real had to be given early in life

(the infant state of total Love)

to keep the initiate hungry, harmonious, and holy--

so he could never be satisfied with anything less than

what he once knew for sure!

(and is still for sure--
Love!)

~R. Rohr