"In the New Testament, whenever Jesus eats with or encounters the rich he always, without exception, challenges them to come beyond where they are. Yet he never accuses them of malice. He instead shows them their blindness.
Always the judgment is blindness. The rich man just can't see the plight of Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31). The rich man is not evil, he didn't cause the poor man at his gate to be poor. He simply wasn't aware. He couldn't see. That spiritual blindness is the primary sin.
Spirituality is about waking up. Eastern religions know this. The word Buddha means 'the awakened one.' Spirituality has come upon hard times in the West, where legalism so often took over that we didn't need spirituality. We lost the spiritual disciplines and tools to know how to remain awake. We lost the disciplines that show us what's happening, what human relationships mean, the effects of what we do to one another in our relationships.
The Church must continually be taught by the poor. Those who are oppressed and kicked around, who are not beneficiaries of the system, always hold for us the greatest breakthrough-truth and the greatest wisdom. In mythology they are imaged as blind beggars who in fact are true seers.
The same is true inside ourselves. That part of ourself that we most hate, that we are most afraid of and most reject, is the poor, oppressed woman or man within. That hated person within holds our greatest gift. We must hold out a preferential option for our own poverty. Our poverty has the key; it offers the breakthrough moment for us to wake up. It's the hole in the soul, that place where we are radically broken, where we are powerless and therefore open."
--Richard Rohr, from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps. Re-excerpted in Radical Grace: Daily Meditations with Richard Rohr. Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1995.
"Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart . . . " -- Joel 2:12
