Pá 17 června 2005

Oh well, I tried to avoid falling into trap of commenting publicly all the stuff I have no clue about, but I cannot avoid thinking about politics, when I have finally found Richard Roth’s quotation on pain:

According to the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, spirituality is not for people who are trying to avoid hell; it is for people who have been through hell. In many ways, spirituality is about what we do with our pain. And the truth is, if we don’t transform it, we will transmit it.

(I know it is second-hand quotation, but I haven’t found anything better, and this cite is repeated so many times over the web, that I assume it is reasonably correct).

I was listening to the Christopher and Dorothy’s sermon about raising children, where they quoted this claim by Rohr, and so I have finally searched for it on the Web. I found it quoted many times, but I have never found the original. However, I found one interesting article by Rohr about post-09/11 America.

When I was cooking a dinner I was thinking about it, and one thing which came to me very clear was thinking about Iraq and Afghanistan. How actually there is much about transmitting pain in invading Iraq and how little of true transformation happened in the United States after 09/11 (transformation meaning especially μετάνοια—changing the ways we think about the world). And in order that I would not be accussed of anti-Americanism, then I have to say that other thing which came to my mind in the same moment was doubts about the reasons why the Central European countries (“New Europe” of Mr. Rumsfeld) participated in the invasion to Iraq. It seems to me that there is something about cynical calculation of safe playing on the same side as the biggest guy on the playing field, maybe even subserviency to the stronger guy.

However, despite writing this I am not sure, that whole Iraq campaign is necessarily bad decision—besides getting rid of the Saddam Hussain, whole Middle East may be really shaken up to reform itself to more democracy and eliminate the Islam fundamentalism in the long run. Just that not all reasons for doing this were noble and pure. Who knows about the future?

Category: faith Tagged: politics desertStream