Falling Forever Thursday, December 4, 2014 James Finley writes - TopicsExpress

Falling Forever Thursday, December 4, 2014 James Finley writes in “Ripening,” an issue of CAC’s journal, Oneing: “The lifelong process of ripening brings about a corresponding ripening of our ability to understand the fundamentals in a wiser, peace-giving manner. For example, when people who believe in God go through painful experiences they are naturally troubled. They often feel, ‘If God watches over me, how could God let this happen to me?’ This is such an understandable response to suffering in the life of those who trust and believe in God’s providential care. “However, as a person ripens in unsayable intimacies in God, they ripen in a paradoxical wisdom. They come to understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. This is the Mystery of the Cross that reveals whatever it means that God watches over us; it does not mean that God prevents the tragic thing, the cruel thing, the unfair thing, from happening. Rather, it means that God is intimately hidden as a kind of profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself—and will continue to do so in every moment of our lives up to and through death, and beyond. Saint John of the Cross talks about a windfall of delight. When fruit becomes very ripe, the slightest wind can cause it to fall to the ground. The windfall of delight first pertains to those little promises along the way, but also to our last breath, which we know and trust will send us falling forever into the deathless depths of God.” Richard Rohr Adapted from Ripening, Oneing, Vol. 1, No. 2 Gateway to Silence: Falling forever into the deathless depths of God.