Basically love works only works inside humility. […] Fullness in a person cannot permit love because there are no openings, no handles, no give-and-take, and no deep hunger. It is like trying to attach two inflated balloons to one another.*
(Richard Rohr)

Personal stability doesn’t come from being powerful or self-sufficient, but through humility, gratitude and faithfulness These infused with love, forgiveness and service.

We must also add pain and suffering – which is to love, forgive and serve ourselves, otherwise we hide from ourselves and our True Self, as well as from others.

Yesterday’s post was pondering what James Carse means by touch and move. Touching suggests intimacy and requires that we be our True Self, as Richard Rohr proffers – moving being how the False Self relates:

intimacy happens when we reveal and expose our insides, and this is always scary*.

We remember that it is possible to hide from ourselves as well as from others.

This behaviour of the False Self being more likely to try and move others in developed further by Carse when he suggests, the things we through up as screens to others being the very means by which we are moved:

This means that we can be moved only by persons who are not what they are; we can be moved only when we are not who we are, but are what we cannot be. […] We can be moved only by way of our veils. We are touched though our veils.**

The veils suggest our power, invulnerability and sufficiency, but the True Self is a poor self, a connected self, an intimate self:

And this is exactly what the moment of intimacy of moment always is, even from God. It is always a moment of “poverty” from one side or the other – or both.*

Until I allow this – which is a true expression of strength – I am likely to moved and react with counter-move, whilst what our world needs is for people to meet each other in their poverty – and their beauty – in order to discover and contribute courage, generosity and wisdom.

(*From Richard Rohr’s Immortal Diamond.)
(**From James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games.)