THE GETTING OF WISDOM

We can take a long time to accumulate wisdom if we never stop talking. The ability to listen as a habit opens us to new ideas and more life. Don’t imprison yourself in your own ideas. We are not compelled to live in inherited bubbles of illusion.

Humility is the Door to wisdom and wisdom is a hallway to life. Prejudice is like the blinkers that horses wear. Blinkers are made for horses. An open heart opens us to God and His unlimited life. The worst addiction is the addiction to our own ideas. Why live from ides that are the opiate of your community when there is a simple gospel available to all whose prize infinite life?

AN ALIVE SPIRIT
There are people you can talk to because they listen. They are not full of themselves and their stale ideas but are seekers of life – fellow travellers who want more of life which means more of Jesus Christ. They are open-minded but not so open-minded that they are nutters. They have a structure in which they live that is them in the Being of God. They share themselves and their adventure in Christ and they listen to yours, rejoicing in new insights gained and fresh escapes from any common misguided orthodoxy. I mean the milieu of un-life from which Jesus came to set captives free.

DEAD TREES
Others, who one meets on festive occasions or rigid minded folks from parts of the world where stagnant thinking and authoritarianism flourish we must engage out of  grace, politeness and love for Christ. But at the end of the conversation, we realise we have been talking to a dead tree or a dried-up pond.  Simply not alive, these ideologues are a cross to bear and a challenge to grace and in so much need of real life. Who knew?

HE SHARED LIFE
In the introduction to ‘Following Jesus’ Richard Rohr writes of Henry Nouwen – a stream of ‘living water’ person who unconsciously gives out life because He has found THE LIFE in which to live. “Because I looked up to him as a wise and holy elder, I would often try to get some free spiritual direction out of him. Only a few minutes into it, I’d realize that he never really answered my questions, but had somehow turned it around to make me into his spiritual director! I was never sure if it was humility on his part or some kind of unconscious need for reciprocity, but I finally concluded that it was a totally sincere spiritual search and he valued my insights as much as his own. As much as I knew that he was a spiritual writer, in real life he was a spiritual seeker and believer.” (1) This is the living way to break out of the bubble of stagnation.

THE QUEST FOR FRESH BREAD
Not everyone is alive. We never will be in religion. Our spirit comes alive as a result of direct union with Jesus. This is ours when not smothered by the law and religion. Richard Rohr is telling of a person who is living water because He has made it his life work to seek life no matter what boundaries he must cross to bathe in the River of Life. This is not a person who makes do with last week’s milk or the flat soft drink or inherited beliefs. He seeks life for itself.

LIFE THAT IS THE LIGHT
Life is not contained in an ideology. It is not the possession of right or left. It’s not the possession of nice people because they are nice. Ignorance of life is ignorance no matter who has it. Life cannot be hemmed in by religion and there is not much of it in fundamentalism.

Life is not words but THE WORD who is the logos who is the Reality that Paul calls The Law of the Spirit of Life. This is not an abstraction. It relates to us as Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is the expression of life itself – the Door to the trinity that is God. The trinity is love, life and truth manifest as God. This is the hub of the universe.

When Jesus is our life we will possess this life as our own. We will be open to truth, discerners of folly and intolerant of lies that suffocate love, belonging and unlimited life. Our aim will never be to perpetrate inherited prejudices or ignorance and lies just because they are ours. But to join Jesus to multiply life without limit.
 
(1)Excerpt From: Henri J. M. Nouwen. “Following Jesus.” Apple Books.