The Importance Of Good Theology

If you draw close to someone who is in a violent or fearful state, you will likely discover that his or her operative image of God (usually largely unconscious) is inadequate, distorted, or even toxic. That’s why good theology is still important.

What Is Absent Is Awareness

We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.

The Primary Task Of Religion

We must all overcome the illusion of separateness. It is the primary task of religion to communicate not worthiness but union, to reconnect people to their original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3: 3).

Trinity Is The Model For All Reality

Richard sees love as the metaphysical foundation of everything because Trinity is the model for all reality. God is all-vulnerable relationship—ever outpouring and ever infilling love. God can only be experienced through friendship, not ideas.

Only Those With Nothing To Protect

The only ones who can accept the proclamation of the Reign are those who have nothing to protect, not their own self-image or their reputation, their possessions, their theology, their principles, or their certitudes.

Eveything Else Is Relative

The proclamation of the Reign of God means that only one thing is absolute –everything else is relative. Everything else is merely a means to the end. That includes the Church, the Bible, the sacraments, and all the exercises of spiritual life.

Relax Into This Relationship

This is what mothering taught me about God: we relax into this relationship. 5 He caught me with a taste of unconditional love, and then he taught me how to relax into that loving.

The Point Is

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther’s Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn’t the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now—that is the point.

We’ve Lost The Art Of Detachment

I don’t advise trying to master fears. You can’t fix the soul. You can only acknowledge your own rage and your fear of trusting and refuse to identify with it. Because we’ve lost the art of detachment, we’re now an addictive society.

Say It Like You Mean It

We cannot pray the Jesus prayer, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” unless we are willing to act as agents of that in-breaking kingdom by giving up our petty divisions, our excessive claims and our symbols of power and begin to devote all our energies to building a different kind of world.