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by
Richard Rohr
Read between
December 14 - December 14, 2019
He constantly warned us against any heady or negative attitudes toward higher-ups.
no pope, priest, or parishioner has ever been excommunicated for living too rich a lifestyle, or for being ambitious, greedy, or prideful, even though Jesus condemned these things much more directly and openly than for what we usually excommunicate people.
It often seems that where Jesus is truly dualistic, we refuse to be, and where Jesus was very unclear or never spoke, we have arrived at absolutely certain conclusions!
Organized religion has paid much more attention to some things that Jesus never once mentioned (birth control, abortion, and homosexuality) and rather totally ignores other things that he stated with utter clarity (“Go sell what you have and give it to the poor”
any debates about Franciscan spirituality were not usually oppositional but had to do with what was stressed and how it was stressed, which makes a lot of difference in your practical ethos and imaginal world.
God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.
organized religion is almost structurally certain to create hypocrites (literally meaning “actors”), those who try to appear to be pure and good, or at least better than others.
None of us lives up to all of our spoken ideals, but we have to pretend that we do to feel good about ourselves and to get others of our chosen group to respect us.
Any top-down religion trains you in pretending, denying, and projecting your evil elsewhere, without wanting you to realize that you are doing this.
He rebuilt the spiritual life on “love alone,” and let go of the lower-level needs of social esteem, security, self-image, and manufacturing of persona.
The opposite of Twitter
Francis did not waste time in moral or mental gymnastics to assert that he, or his group, was right or superior.
By patriarchy (“the rule of the fathers”), I mean when any group or individual operates in such a way that others must concede so that the dominant group is always first, in control, and right. Patriarchy frames life as essentially competition and “the survival of the fittest,” and there must be clear winners and losers.
Once you are educated into various institutions, you have access and connections and are not really powerless anymore.
It also—ironically—gave us the scriptural, spiritual, and theological tools by which to critique its own structures and practice, which is the only way to critique anything—from the inside out. This is a great shock and surprise for many of us, and I am convinced that it is why Catholicism tends to produce so many great souls. You have to learn non-dualistic thinking to survive happily inside of any total institution. Catholics are often masters at “yes, and,” without even knowing it.
If I tell them, they will consider me a fool; if I am silent, I cannot escape my conscience.
Conservative Catholics love to think that the Church is semper eadem, “always the same.” A true knowledge of history shows that is not at all the case, and, in fact, quite the opposite.
Deus Vult
Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more it is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for, the very One who created you. Each is both a part that is like the Whole and also contributes to the Whole, just as Paul teaches in his analogy of the body (1 Corinthians 12:12–30). The world we live in today no longer enjoys any natural sense of this wholeness, and therefore of holiness. In our secular mind, we do not inherently and naturally “participate” in this creation, but we think we
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The Eternal God was presented as driving a very hard bargain, as though he were just like many people we don’t like.
It is no wonder that Christianity did not produce more mystics and saints over the centuries. Unconsciously, and often consciously, many people did not trust or even like this Father God, much less want to be in union with him.
Basically when you lose the understanding of God’s perfect and absolute freedom and eagerness to love, which Scotus insisted on, humanity is relegated to the world of counting! Everything has to be measured, accounted for, doled out, earned, and paid back.
we are all saved by grace and the utter freedom of God to love who and what God wills, without our tit-for-tat thinking getting in the way of God’s absolute freedom, and absolute freedom to love.
God does not love us because we are that good; God loves us because God is good. Nothing humans can do will inhibit, direct, decrease, or increase God’s eagerness to love.
So we need to first find truth in relationships and in ourselves, and not in theories. Only great love can handle great truth.
I believe that Francis was unique and ahead of his time for loving and relating to both the historical Jesus and the eternal Christ at the same time, surely without fully realizing that was what he was doing.
The great notion of Christian salvation had become a private evacuation plan into the next world for some very few humans. God’s people did not seem to care much about any “new earth” or the “universal restoration” that the Bible had offered us
“The point of intersection of the timeless with time is the occupation for the saint,”
Not surprisingly, therefore, many Christians ended up tragically fighting evolution along with most early human-rights struggles (woman’s suffrage, voting rights for those on the margins, racism, classism, homophobia, earth care, justice itself, even slavery)192, because we had no evolutionary notion of Christ who was forever “groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22). We should have been on the front line of all of these issues, and our bold proclamation of love and justice could have pulled humanity grandly forward.
Immature religion actually stalls us at very low levels of well-disguised egocentricity, by fooling us into thinking we are more moral, holy, or evolved than we really are.
The Eastern Church called this process theosis or divinization, and it is their greatest contribution to worldwide Christianity.
The good news is that we also are part of the eternal divine dance, but now as the ongoing Body of Christ extended in space and time.
The personal God revealed in both the Scriptures and the Perennial Tradition makes known a divine nature that is seductive, self-disclosing, and immensely self-giving to those who are interested. This experience of “overflow” invites us into immense freedom, along with intimacy and real friendship. Such a relationship deeply empowers anyone who engages with it. (If any relationship does not somehow empower you, it is not authentic or truly “personal.”)
An overly defended person, or someone who is antagonistic or hateful, will try to push his “squareness” through the “round” hole of God, and it just won’t work.
as soon as any giving wants or needs a reward in return, you have backed away from love, which is why even our common notion of “heaven” can keep us from the pure love of God or neighbor!
Wisdom, just like good poetry, must and will always “resist intelligence,” as New England poet Wallace Stevens says enigmatically. It gives just enough of reality to keep us out of our too-easy egotistic center and still needing more; and, quite honestly, needing a spiritual state to complete the “logic.” Mature spirituality, or wisdom, insists that we hold out for meaning instead of settling for mere answers. Wisdom is necessarily and always partially hidden, and reveals herself only to those who really want her and will not try to make a commodity of her (Old Testament book of Wisdom
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Immature Christianity is primarily responsible for the vast agnosticism we now see in the Western world.
People normally have no need to react against God; it is only our arrogant, cruel, and glib ideas about God that they are usually rejecting.
God works best underground, by rearranging our assumptions and presuppositions and dreams—frankly, when we are asleep, and not in control, exactly as the psalmist promised
“You must preach the Gospel at all times, and when necessary use words.”
He knew that happy and humble people finally change people, much more than ideas, sermons, or theology ever will.
