This is from Richard Rohr, another author I appreciate. You can subscribe to his daily email.
What can I do about his insight in this? I live in the the land of stone houses. But I can at least let the words poke into my door way... the stir to community and interdependence, the deception and lures of my private possessions? Something about simplicity? My sense of self? ....What do you think?
Read on:
Some people live without anything and have everything. The example that always comes to mind for me is in Africa. This little old black African man and I prayed together after a long session. He prayed with such tenderness, saying, "O Lord, help us never to move into stone houses." And everybody echoed, "Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord."
Afterward I asked the missionaries what he had meant. "Well," a priest said, "look at the villages. They're all door-less thatch huts. And so as long as you live a simple life in a thatch hut with no doors, you don't know where your family ends and where the next family begins. You move in and out of one another's lives, and it's all really one family. And there's no possessing, there's no mine and thine; it's ours. It's a world of community." "Once the first stone hut is built in a village," the missionary continued, "very quickly a door and locks are put on it. Immediately the world of mine and thine is created. The entire social worldview, the entire understanding of self, changes but… I'd say you can't see God very well if you spend too much time inside your stone house.
Richard Rohr A Spirituality of Subtraction
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