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A stone in Laoshan with Taichi symbol engraved. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taichi_Stone_of_Laoshan.jpg    

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

The Principle of Likeness

You Become
the God You Worship

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The “Principle of Likeness” means that like knows like, love in me knows love. And hate in me will see hate everywhere else. If there’s no love in you, if you are filled with fear and hatred, you will not know God. You actually can’t. There’s no abiding place for an infinite God in you, because your field is too small and safe. The infinite cannot abide inside of the finite unless the finite is somehow released from its small boundaries and attracted outward into a Larger Field. I actually think that is what we mean by “salvation.”

The commandments, you know, are not requirements to get God to love you. That is forever and already taken care of. Moral mandates are requirements for your own self expansion and transformation, allowing you to begin to see in a broad and non-self-referential way. They put up necessary barriers to your natural egocentricity and allow you to encounter and reverence the other precisely as other (and not me!), and frankly so you can recognize your own stingy spirit. How can you possibly be prepared to know the Ultimate Other, that some of us call God, if you cannot stretch yourself to meet the little every day needs of “others” that are often an irritant, a demand, a stretch?

Each daily encounter is your chance for training and concrete practice in mercy, forgiveness, and compassion. As this love place grows within you, you will be more and more capable of knowing and loving God too. Although to be honest, I am not sure which comes first? Do loving people meet God or do people who have met God know how to love? All I know is that there is eventually a major equivalence between you and the God you worship. If you are a merciful, forgiving person, then I know you’ve met the real God. If you are narrow, stingy, and fearful, then you are worshiping something that is not God, probably some form of yourself.

Adapted from The Enneagram as a Tool for Your Spiritual Journey,
disc 7 (CD, DVD, MP3 download)

Gateway to Silence:
The silence in me will love the divine silence. �Eckhart Tolle

 
 

"Evidence"
a new edition of Oneing, a journal of the CAC

 

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.
—Hebrews 11:1

 

Featuring Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault,
James Finley, Kathleen Dowling Singh, and others

 

Purchase this limited-edition publication at store.cac.org

 

A few copies of the previous issue, “Transgression” are also available.

 

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