Someone has demonstrated to you that you matter and he or she loves you enough to help you structure your ability to say yes and no to the world in a strengthening, not destructive-to-you way.
From your loyal soldier posture, you begin to wonder why there is such a tragic dimension to the world. If good choices can make life happen for you as you have been studiously learning, wouldn't the elimination of tragedy and suffering be manageable simply through the whole world making better choices?
That surely looks to be true.
Until we actually listen to the biblical revelation in Rohr's words:
The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve its only promised wholeness, which is much of the point of this whole book [Falling Upward]. (p. 59).It is astonishing to us in our first half of life to realize that evil fits inside Jesus' embrace. Evil is the root out of which our capacity for sin grows. The transformational forgiveness of God only works if a transformation is required.
We are left with a dilemma. The brokenness of the world cannot be reconciled with our first-half-of-life container that has come to understand right and wrong. If that was all there was to it, wouldn't God of all people just commerce in the right?
Rohr leads us into just what we need at this point: a great turnaround, a way to reconcile that which is without apparent reconciliation in our first-half state. He says:
In the divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the base metal and raw material for the redemption experience itself. (p. 60).God chooses our messes, not our attempts at perfection, through which to demonstrate His massive and redemptive love through grace.
How in the world does this "make sense?"
Goodbye, religion. Hello, broken world.
Stay tuned. We are just getting to the good part.
