Crucifix (detail) by Cimabue, 1287-88. Museo dell'Opera di Santa Croce, Florence.    

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Transformative Dying

What Must Die

Sunday, April 13, 2014

All the great religions of the world talk a lot about death, so there must be an essential lesson to be learned through death. The problem has been that we might know something has to die, but throughout much of religious history our emphasis has been on killing the wrong thing and therefore not learning the real lesson. Historically we moved from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to various modes of seeming self-sacrifice, usually involving the body self.

God was not considered friendly. God was distant and scary. God was not someone with whom you fell in love or with whom you could imagine sharing intimacy. Instead, God was viewed as an angry deity who must be placated with some sort of blood sacrifice. Jesus presented a much different image of God, but it seems very hard for people to let go of their punitive ideas of God.

Sadly, the history of violence and the history of religion are almost the same history. When religion remains at the immature level, it tends to create very violent people who ensconce themselves on the side of the good and the worthy and the pure and the saved. They project all their evil somewhere else and attack it over there. At this level, they export the natural death instinct onto others, as though it’s someone else who has to die.

The truth is it’s you who has to die, or rather, who you think you are, the False Self.

Authentic religion is always about you. It’s saying you change first.


Adapted from “Dying: We Need It for Life” (Richard Rohr on Transformation)
(available through Franciscan Media)
and Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 193

Gateway to Silence:
I lose my life to find Life.

 
 

 
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