Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

by Richard Rohr

Can you see the image of Christ in the least of your brothers and sisters? He uses that as his only description of the final judgment. Nothing about commandments, nothing about church attendance, nothing about papal infallibility: simply a matter of our ability to see. Can we see Christ in the least of our brothers and sisters? “They smell. They’re a nuisance. They’re on welfare. They are a drain on our tax money,” we say. Can we see Christ in the people, the nobodies who can’t play our game of success? When we can see the image of God where we don’t want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own. Finally, Jesus says we have to love and recognize the divine image even in our enemies. He teaches what many thought a leader could never demand of his followers: love of the enemy. Logically that makes no sense. But soulfully it makes absolute sense, because in terms of the soul, it really is all or nothing. Either we see the divine image in all created things, or we don’t see it at all. Once we see it, we’re trapped. We see it once and the circle keeps moving out. If we still try to exclude some (sick people, blacks, people on welfare, gays, or whomever we’ve decided to hate), we’re not there. We don’t yet understand. If the world is a temple, then our enemies are sacred, too. The ability to respect the outsider is probably the litmus test of true seeing. It doesn’t even stop with human beings and enemies and the least of the brothers and sisters. It moves to f...