Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

They call me the mailman at the CAC because almost every day I take the mail to and pick up the mail from the post office. At the end of our street, which is called Five Points Road, five streets come together. The stoplight at this intersection seems interminably long. One day, as I was impatiently waiting and waiting for the light to turn green, I felt God saying to me, “Richard, are you really going to be any happier on the other side of Bridge Avenue?”

Now it has become my daily meditation place where I get to practice living right here, right now. If I can’t experience God and love and happiness and everything that matters in this impatient moment, I probably won’t experience it on the other side of Bridge Avenue either. As Catherine of Siena said, “It’s heaven all the way to heaven, and it’s hell all the way to hell!”

Maybe one day we will all say, like Jacob at the foot of his dreamy ladder, where angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth, “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). And Jacob was sleeping on a hard stone pillow!

Adapted from Living the Eternal Now (CD, MP3 download);

and Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps, p. 66

Gateway to Silence:
The kingdom of heaven is at hand (Matthew 3:2).