This is as good of an explanation as Ive heard about what it really means when we say that God protects us. God clearly doesnt stop bad things happening (why that may be is a whole other discussion). Gods protection more often comes in the form of an underlying presence, a sweetness, an appreciation for life even when it is as its more terrible. It is protection in the same way that love is a power. It isnt good for much in the practical way we usually measure things...and yet it can get you through the worst life has to throw at you. From Richard Rohr: ------ Falling Forever James Finley writes in “Ripening,” an issue of CAC’s journal, Oneing: “The lifelong process of ripening brings about a corresponding ripening of our ability to understand the fundamentals in a wiser, peace-giving manner. For example, when people who believe in God go through painful experiences they are naturally troubled. They often feel, ‘If God watches over me, how could God let this happen to me?’ This is such an understandable response to suffering in the life of those who trust and believe in God’s providential care. “However, as a person ripens in unsayable intimacies in God, they ripen in a paradoxical wisdom. They come to understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. This is the Mystery of the Cross that reveals whatever it means that God watches over us; it does not mean that God prevents the tragic thing, the cruel thing, the unfair thing, from happening. Rather, it means that God is intimately hidden as a kind of profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself—and will continue to do so in every moment of our lives up to and through death, and beyond. Saint John of the Cross talks about a windfall of delight. When fruit becomes very ripe, the slightest wind can cause it to fall to the ground. The windfall of delight first pertains to those little promises along the way, but also to our last breath, which we know and trust will send us falling forever into the deathless depths of God.” Adapted from Ripening, Oneing, Vol. 1, No. 2
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 13:00:01 +0000