Everything Belongs, Chapter One

I've been reading a lot lately - not a lot else to do - and one of the books I've started to re-read is a book by Richard Rohr called Everything Belongs. I first heard of this book when Zach Lind (of Jimmy Eat World) raved about it on his blog. Rohr is the founder of a spiritual retreat center in Albuquerque, NM (not one of my favorite places - the city, not the retreat center) and speaks at many different conferences and workshops. I consider myself a contemplative type of person, so this book has appealed to me on pretty much all levels.

Here are the quotes I wrote down from Chapter 1:

- We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

- It seems that we as Christians have been worshiping Jesus' journey instead of doing His journey.

- The gift that true contemplatives offer to themselves and society is that they know themselves as part of a much larger story, a much larger self.

- Yet true contemplatives are paradoxically risk-takers and reformists, precisely because they have no private agendas, jobs or semantics to maintain. Their security and identity are found in God, not in being right, being paid by a church, or looking for promotion in people's eyes.

- God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

- If you want a litmus test for people who are living out of one's true self, that might be it: they are always free to obey, but they might also disobey the expectations of church and state to obey who-they-are-in-God.

- By contrast, probably the most obvious indication of non-centered ("ec-centric") people is that they are, frankly, very difficult to live with. Every one of their ego- boundaries must be defended, negotiated or worshiped; their reputation, their needs, their nation, their security, their religion, even their ball team. They convince themselves that these boundaries are all that they have to worry about because they are the sum-total of their identity.

- I believe that we have no real access to who we really are except in God.