Dying by Brightness Sunday, October 7, 2018, Richard Rohr edit

Unknowing: Week 2

 Dying by Brightness 

Sunday, October 7, 2018

https://cac.org/dying-by-brightness-2018-10-07/

I die by brightness & the Holy Spirit.

 Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

growth is a long process of being drawn “by brightness & 
the Holy Spirit,” 

the Holy Spirit 
leads & directs
 this undoing. 

 our “dying” is 
as we have to gradually let go 
of our need for control, our small selfserving worldviews, 
 our comforting certitudes about which we are really not certain at all...a dying that we must both allow from our side and also allow to be done to us

Contemplation..

waits for 
 the moments,    accepts the    moments, and trusts the moments that come 
like a “creation out of nothing” instead of filling the silence with our own words and ideas. 

contemplation overcomes thegap between
 being doing. It allows us to 

 live trustfully in our naked being-in-God, w/o dressing it up with performance of any kind.

dualistic thinking (quick, certain, and smug judgments). 

Judgmentalism and dismissiveness does not overcome distinctions but actually magnifies them. 

Judgmentalism

limited tool of differentiation and critique

The fatal mistake of ego consciousness... 

excludes & eliminates the unconscious where real virtue & extreme evil  hide

— our common consciousness is actually not conscious at all. 

the human ego prefers knowing and being certain over being honest

Don’t bother me with the truth

I want to be in control

It does give them a sense of being right & in charge, but it seldom 

yields compassion,

 community,

 or wisdom.

We are led forward by brightness

Readiness contains the negative, 

problematic, difficult,

 unknown shadow self.” 

God’s brightness does not exclude or deny anything. 

Divine perfection is precisely the ability to include imperfection; 

we think we must exclude, deny, and even punish it! 

   The flow of grace is an increasing ability to forgive reality for being what it is—instead of what we

 want it to be. 


The beauty of the unconscious, whether personal or collective, is that it knows a great deal, but it also knows that 

it does not know, cannot say, 

dare not try 

to prove or 

assert too 

strongly. 

What it does know is that there is always more—and all words will fall short and all concepts will be incomplete.

The contemplative is precisely the person who agrees to live in that kind of blinding brightness. The paradox, of course, is that it does not feel like brightness at all, but what John of the Cross (1542-1591) called a “luminous darkness” and others identify as “learned ignorance.”

We can't grow in the integrative dance of action and contemplation w/o a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and a willingness not to know—and not even to need to know. What else would give us peace and 

contentment?