We have to remember that how we do anything is how we do everything. How we do this moment is how we are going to do the next moment. If we’re bored to death with this moment, we’re going to be bored to death with the next moment. We have to be awake right now, and we can be awake through silence. It is not a matter of being more moral but of being more conscious—which will eventually make us much more moral. What it means to be vulnerable before a moment is to give it the power to change us. If we do not give another person, animal, event, situation, or emotion the power to influence us, to change us, then we are not intimate with the moment, not vulnerable before the only reality we have. In many ways, intimacy before the moment, vulnerability in the presence of all reality, is the very definition of spirituality.
It would indeed be heroic if we could live our whole life inside of this kind of semi-permeable membrane. It would allow all events in, enough to really change us, and allow us out of our prisons—to change the world a bit, I would hope. If our spirituality does not make us more vulnerable, I doubt whether it is much good.
—from the book Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation
by Richard Rohr, OFM
