Richard Rohr Reorders the Universe

suffering is the greatest problem that confronts the religious consciousness – by which I mean the sort of mind that can’t help asking if there is any meaning in or beyond the universe.

Judaism is structurally unique—the only world religion ever to believe in a universal God, the God of all peoples, times and places, and at the same time to believe in a particular way of life that not all people have to follow, because just as there is more than one way to be a leader, so there is more than one way to find God.

In other words, the goal is actually not the perfect avoidance of all sin, which is not possible anyway (1 John 1:8–9; Romans 5:12), but the struggle itself, and the encounter and wisdom that comes from it.