The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe

by Richard Rohr

Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be? “Christ” is a word for the Primordial Template (“Logos”) through whom “all things came into being, and not one thing had its being except through him” (John 1:3).

light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else. This is why in John’s Gospel, Jesus Christ makes the almost boastful statement “I am the Light of the world” (John 8:12).

We ended up spreading our national cultures under the rubric of Jesus, instead of a universally liberating message under the name of Christ.

What I am calling in this book an incarnational worldview is the profound recognition of the presence of the divine in literally “every thing” and “every one.”

Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ’s historical manifestation in time.

Jesus is a Third Someone, not just God and not just man, but God and human together.

God loves things by becoming them. And as we’ve just seen, God did so in the creation of the universe and of Jesus, and continues to do so in the ongoing human Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:12ff.)

As Paul says in his great hymn to love, “There are only three things that last, faith, hope and love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). All else passes.

Faith, hope, and love are the very nature of God, and thus the nature of all Being. Such goodness cannot die. (Which is what we mean when we say “heaven.”)

love is always hopeful and faithful, hope is always loving and faithful, and faith is always loving and hopeful. They are the very nature of God and thus of all Being. Such

Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.

God’s presence can be seen in the ordinary and the material, and we do not have to wait for supernatural apparitions.

John’s Gospel when the author says, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of humanity” (John 1: 1–4), all grounded in the Logos becoming flesh (1:14). The early Eastern Fathers made much of this universal and corporate notion of salvation, both in art and in theology, but not so much in the West.

The precise and intended effect of such a light is to see Christ everywhere else. In fact, that is my only definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.

You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don’t believe it.

“Examine yourselves to make sure you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you acknowledge that Jesus Christ is really in you? If not, you have failed the test” (2 Corinthians 13:5–6). So simple it’s scary! Paul’s radical incarnationalism sets a standard for all later Christian saints, mystics, and prophets.

LOVE AFTER LOVE The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. I hope this book has helped you to experience—and to know—that the Christ, you, and every “stranger” are all the same gazing.

A material worldview tends to create highly consumer-oriented and competitive cultures, which are often preoccupied with scarcity, since material goods are always limited.

The spiritual worldview, taken too seriously, has little concern for the earth, the neighbor, or justice, because it considers this world largely as an illusion.

priestly worldview help us make good connections that are not always obvious between the material and spiritual worlds. But the downside is that this view assumes that the two worlds are actually separate and need someone to bind them back together

incarnational worldview, in which matter and Spirit are understood to have never been separate. Matter and spirit reveal and manifest each other. This view relies more on awakening than joining, more on seeing than obeying, more on growth in consciousness and love than on clergy, experts, morality, scriptures, or rituals.

Only sincere and longtime seekers experience the deep satisfaction of an incarnational worldview. It does not just fall into your lap. You have to know its deep significance and seek Spirit in and through matter.