Great Saints, Great Sinners

Great Saints, Great Sinners


Richard Rohr

Sin and grace are related. In a certain sense the only way we really understand salvation, grace, and freedom, is by understanding their opposites. That's why the great saints are, invariably, converted sinners. When you finally have to eat and taste your own hard-heartedness, your own emptiness, selfishness and all the rest, then you open up to grace. That is the pattern in all our lives. That's why it was such a grace in my hermitage year when I was able, at last---even as a male and a German---to weep over my sins and to feel tremendous sadness at my own silliness and stupidity. I think all of us have to confront ourselves as poor people in that way. And that's why many of our greatest moments of grace follow upon, sometimes, our greatest sins. We are hard-hearted and closed-minded for years, then comes the moment of vulnerability and mercy. We break down and break through. Source: Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction via inward/outward.

Being Busy

"Being busy is a form of laziness : lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is as unproductive as doing nothing, and far more unpleasant. Being selective - doing less - is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few, and ...ignore the rest. Lack of time is actually a lack of priorities." From Derek Sivers' website, notes on Tim Ferris' book

Enneagram Twos

Twos learned two things growing up: to put other people's needs ahead of their own, and that they must give in order to get. Twos feel that if they take care of others, others will take care of them. (The Power of the Enneagram audio tapes)

Poverty in the West

Love this quote :

“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”

-Mother Teresa

Megalong Valley

The creek where we scattered Phil's ashes ...