I am convinced that most of the saints were religious dropouts from societies that were going nowhere. Faith called them to drop out and believe in something else. Jesus announcement of the Kingdom of God was telling us that culture as we've created it is on a track towards self-destruction and emptiness. He told us we can "Get off the train" at the next stop and re-center our lives in truth and objectivity. All we have to give up is the utterly false understanding that we have of ourselves from civil society. For some reason that liberation seems to be the most difficult thing in the world.
    Finding God and losing the self-are the same thing; we don't really come to it naturally or choose it of ourselves. Faith is always God's thing. It seems to be the only way the Lord can draw us into a new viewpoint, a new point from which to view the life that is larger than life. That life is love!
   
   Fr. Richard Rohr.  >Radical Grace<  Daily meditations!