Posted on by Kurt Bodling

hold on for now

“You cannot imagine a new space fully until you have been taken there. I make this point strongly to help you understand why almost all spiritual teachers tell you to ‘believe’ or ‘trust’ or ‘hold on.’ They are not just telling you to believe silly or irrational things. They are telling you to hold on until you can go on the further journey for yourself, and they are telling you that the whole spiritual journey is, in fact, for real–which you cannot possibly know yet.”

Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward: a Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), page xxvii.

There were so, so many places along the Appalachian Trail which I’d read about for decades and had very clear pictures of in my mind that turned out–when I finally got there–to be nothing at all like I’d pictured them. The inner journey of the spiritual life has been surprising me like that. Heaven will no doubt turn out the same way.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

paradise and solitude

“Modern studies of the Fathers have revealed beyond question that one of the main motives that impelled men to embrace the ‘angelic life’ (bios angelikos) of solitude and poverty in the desert was precisely the hope that by so doing they might return to paradise.

“Now this concept must be properly and accurately understood. Paradise is not ‘heaven.’ Paradise is a state, or indeed a place, on earth. Paradise belongs more properly to the present than to the future life. In some sense it belongs to both. It is the state in which man was originally created to live on earth. It is also conceived as a kind of antechamber to heaven after death–as for instance at the end of Dante’s Purgatorio. Christ, dying on the cross, said to the good thief at His side: ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise,’ and it was clear that this did not mean, and could not have meant, heaven.” (p. 53)

Merton, Thomas. “The Recovery of Paradise.” (1959) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.