Faithful and Falling Upward

Today the Church commemorates the faithful departed and the texts from the Roman Catholic Lectionary are familiar to us who have attended liturgies to mark the passing of friends and family. In his recent book, Falling Upward, Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr addresses the second half of our spiritual journey when we are dismissing the ego which got us through the first phase of the journey and we are accepting the answer of Jesus in the Gospel of John today that the grain of wheat must die to bear much fruit. As part of this change in our approach to growing in intimacy with God through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit we enter an experience of a second journey where as Rohr puts it, relative to yesterday's texts, that life based on the 8 Beatitudes replaces life driven by the Ten Commandments. We are aware of both the human death to self and the resurrection of intimacy in our relationship with the Divine. This is the intimacy about which Job proclaims that he knows that his Redeemer lives ! The psalmist echoes the praise of the second half journey which is aware through experience of the steadfast love and compassion of God. With Paul we stand today in anticipation of the moment into which we have already entered by intimacy and transcendent Presence when the life of all from all time will be known to us as resurrection