Serious about the Scriptures

My dear friend, Dr. Gerald May, made a distinction years ago that I have found myself using frequently. He says spirituality is not to encourage willfulness, but in fact willingness. Spirituality creates willing people who let go of their need to be first, to be right, to be saved, to be superior, and to define themselves as better than other people. That game is over and gone; and if you haven’t come to the willing level—“not my will but Thy will be done” as Jesus says (Matthew 26:39)—then I think the Bible will almost always be misused.

I would like to say that the goal in general is to be serious about the Scriptures. We have often substituted being literal with being serious, and they are not the same! (Read that a second time, please). The point I would like to make is that literalism is not to take the text seriously at all! Pure literalism in fact avoids the real impact, the real message. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning in a spiritual text. Willful people use Scripture literally when it serves their purposes, and they use it ‘figuratively’ when it gets in the way of their cultural biases; willing people let the Scriptures change them instead of using them to change others.

~Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (CD)

When the Scriptures are used maturely, they proceed in this order:

1. They confront us with a bigger picture than we are used      to: “God’s kingdom” that has the potential to “deconstruct” our false and      smaller kingdoms.
2. They then have the power to convert us to an alternative worldview by proclamation, grace, and the sheer attraction of the good, the true, and the beautiful (not by shame, guilt, or fear which are low-level motivations, but which operate more quickly and so churches often resort to them).
3. They then console us and bring deep healing as they      “reconstruct” us in a new place with a new mind and heart. If you seek      consolation as the first meaning of a Biblical text, you never get very      far, because the small self or ego is still directing the mind and heart.      As many have said before me, the truth will set you free, but first it      must make you miserable.

~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Preparing for Christmas with Richard Rohr

Your image of God, your de facto, operative image of God, lives in a symbiotic relationship with your soul and creates what you become. Loving people, forgiving people have always encountered a loving and forgiving God. Cynical people are cynical about the very possibility of any coherent or loving Center to the universe. So why wouldn’t they become cynical themselves? Of course they do.

When you encounter a truly sacred text, the first questions are not: Did this literally happen just as it states? How can I be saved? What is the right thing for me to do? What is the dogmatic pronouncement here? Does my church agree with this? Who is right and who is wrong here? These are largely ego questions, I am afraid. They are questions that try to secure your position, not questions that help you go on a spiritual path of faith and trust. They constrict you, whereas the purpose of The Sacred is to expand you. I know these are the first questions that come to our mind because that is where we usually live—inside of our mental ego. They are the questions we were trained to ask, because everybody else asks them, unfortunately!

Having read sacred text, I would invite you to ponder these questions:

1. What is God doing here?
2. What does this say about who God is?
3. What does this say about how I can then relate to such      a God?

~Taken from Richard Rohr, A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (CD)