Friday, August 2, 2019

Experiencing transience (Fr. Ron Rolheiser)


  Centuries before Christ, the biblical writer Qoheleth warned us that everything in this life is vanity: 

Vanity of vanities, 
everything is vanity. 

  He uses the word vanity in a different sense than we do today.  For him, it does not connote a psychological narcissism or an unhealthy preoccupation with our appearance and persona.  Rather, for him, vanity simply means vapor, a passing mist, transience, impermanence, something that disappears too quickly.

  Experiencing that transience can give us a heartache, but it can also make us search more deeply inside all this impermanence for that which is permanent.
--Fr. Ron Rolheiser OMI
Facebook, January 10, 2018

Image source:  Earthquake Rose, formed by a pendulum swinging during the 2001 Seattle earthquake, which measured 6.8 on the Richter scale.  https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200105/zero-gravity.cfm . Be sure to clink on the link to get the full story!

No comments:

Post a Comment