Please take one and pass it on

When asked for his message to the world, Ghandi is quoted as saying that his life is his message.Richard Rohr makes the same point when he talks about Mother Teresa, a lowly nun, who could stand before crowds of thousands and repeat simple New Testament phrases and blow people away. He proposes that people were renewed and transformed because, like Jesus and John the Baptist, her authority came from her lifestyle and her pure goodness. "John the Baptist goes on his vision quest into the desert where he faces his aloneness, boredom, and naked self. He returns with a message, with clarity, and with sureness of heart. First he listens long and self-forgetfully, then he speaks, acts, and accepts the consequences."  Rohr goes on to say "transformed people transform people". But transformation alone isn't enough. "The Jewish prophets had one foot in Israel and one foot outside and beyond. So must you have one foot in your historical faith community and one foot in the larger world...in your own world of service, volunteerism, and occupation, or what I call 'lifestyle Christianity'." Rohr points out in his most recent book tying the spiritual journey to a 12 step program, "We do not really appropriate things ourselves until we actively hand them on to others. We have to find the Love, and then give the Love away; and it is amazing how the two events do not always happen within the same group...The first is our spring and our well (home base); the other is the channel away from home base that keeps our well from becoming brackish and stagnant water."  Witness, as it turns out, is not just what we do for others, it is an essential part of our own spiritual growth.