An Inner Drive

Here’s brilliant writing from Richard Rohr and shared in the Daily Meditation, “The Departure and the Return,” for today. I’ve been sensing this for years now:

We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, our true home, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy. We dare not try to fill our souls and minds with numbing addictions, diversionary tactics, or mindless distractions. The disguise of evil is much more superficiality and willful ignorance than the usually listed ‘hot sins.’ God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything… Once we touch upon the Real, there is an inner insistence that the Real, if it is the Real, has to be forever…. In other words, heaven/union/love/home now emerge from within us, much more than from a mere belief system or any belonging system, which largely remain on the outside of the self.

— Richard Rohr

To me, this is also why most churches/religions FAIL to bring people to God even though that’s supposedly why they exist. They become caught up in dogma/belief or socializing or service to the community. Not that those things are necessarily bad. It’s just that they can so easily become distractions from our real goal: a true experience of God which then fuels our existence and service in this world.

We are meant to become love in this world. True spirituality makes us more inclusive, understanding, and compassionate toward all suffering everywhere in the world.