God’s revelations are always pointed, concrete, and specific. They are not a Platonic world of ideas and theories about which you can be right or wrong, or observe from a distance. Divine Revelation is not something you measure or critique. It is not an ideology but a Presence you intuit and meet! It is more Someone than something.
All of this is called the “mystery of incarnation”—enfleshment or embodiment if you prefer—and for Christians it reaches its fullness in the incarnation of God in one ordinary-looking man named Jesus. God materialized in human form, so we could fall in love with a real person, which is the only way we fall in love.
~Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
“Have this mind in yourselves, which is in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped at, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of the human.” ~Phillippians 2:5-7
It’s a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your “I” is great and one with God, you can, ironically, be quite content with a small and ordinary “I.”
No grandstanding is henceforth necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved from the inside out—once and for all. Such salvation is experienced now in small tastes, whetting our appetite for eternity.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction
It is not about becoming spiritual beings nearly as much as about becoming human beings. The biblical revelation is saying that we are already spiritual beings; we just don’t know it yet. The Bible tries to let you in on the secret, by revealing God in ordinary time and place. That’s why so much of the text seems so mundane, practical, specific and, frankly, unspiritual!
We have created a sad kind of dualism between the spiritual and the so-called non-spiritual. This dualism precisely is what Jesus came to reveal as a lie. The principle of Incarnation proclaims that matter and spirit have never been separate. Jesus came to tell us that these two seemingly different worlds are and always have been one. We just couldn’t see it or dare to believe it until God put them together in one human body called Jesus (see Ephesians 2:11-20).
~Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality
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