Breathing Under Water by Richard Rohr

Author:Richard Rohr [Rohr, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SPCK
Published: 2015-04-14T23:00:00+00:00

Right Relationship With Life Itself

Gerald May, a dear and now deceased friend of mine, said in his very wise book Addiction and Grace that addiction uses up our spiritual desire. It drains away our deepest and true desire, that inner flow and life force which makes us “long and pant for running streams” (Psalm 42). Spiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning, for total satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union, and it just got displaced onto the wrong object. It has been a frequent experience of mine to find that many people in recovery often have a unique and very acute spiritual sense; more than most people, I would say. It just got frustrated early and aimed in a wrong direction. Wild need and desire took off before boundaries, strong identity, impulse control, and deep God experience were in place.2

So it is important that you ask, seek, and knock to keep yourself in right relationship with Life Itself. Life is a gift, totally given to you without cost, every day of it, and every part of it. A daily and chosen “attitude of gratitude” will keep your hands open to expect that life, allow that life, and receive life at ever-deeper levels of satisfaction—but never to think you deserve it. Those who live with such open and humble hands receive life’s “gifts, full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over into their lap” (Luke 6:38). In my experience, if you are not radically grateful every day, resentment always takes over. For some reason, to ask “for your daily bread” is to know that it is being given. To not ask is to take your own efforts, needs, and goals—and yourself—far too seriously. Consider if that is not true in your own life.

After a few years in recovery, you will know that your deep and insatiable desiring came from God all along, you went on a bit of detour, looked for love in all the wrong places, and now have found what you really wanted anyway. God is willing to wait for that. Like Jacob at the foot of his dreamy ladder, where angels walk between heaven and earth, you will lay your head on even a stone pillow, and say, “You were here all the time, and I never knew it! This is nothing less than the house of God, this is the very gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16–17).

It’s even better than that. The final discovery, as Thomas Merton put it, is that this “gate of heaven is everywhere”! Now all of our faults and ego possessions are just heavy and burdensome luggage that keep us from walking through this always-open gate—or even seeing it in the first place.

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