Richard Rohr's
Daily Meditation
The Path of Descent
Stumbling
and Falling
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Tuesday, April 1, 2014
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Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual
schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your
life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your
acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will
be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that
point, you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it
(Isaiah 8:14). You will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only
way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your
egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey.
We must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. We must be
out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give
up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. Until we are
led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient,
we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the
constantly flowing stream. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it the Higher Power.
Jesus calls this Ultimate Source the “living water” at the bottom of the well
(John 4:10-14).
The Gospel was able to accept that life is tragic, but then
graciously added that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy.
This is the great turnaround! It all depends on whether we are willing to see
down as up; or as Jung put it, that “where you stumble and fall, there you
find pure gold.” Lady Julian of Norwich said it even more poetically: “First
there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of
God!”
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