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

by Richard Rohr

JESUS SPEAKS TO YOU FROM THE CROSS I am what you are most afraid of: your deepest, most wounded, and naked self. I am what you do to what you could love. I am your deepest goodness and your deepest beauty, which you deny and disfigure. Your only badness consists in what you do to goodness—your own and anybody else’s. You run away from, and you even attack, the only thing that will really transform you. But there is nothing to hate or to attack. If you try, you will become a mirror image of the same. Embrace it all in me. I am yourself. I am all of creation. I am everybody and every thing. YOU SPEAK BACK TO THE CRUCIFIED ONE Brother Jesus, you are my life, which I deny. You are my death, which I fear. I embrace them both in you. Now I recognize—through you and because of you—that death and life are not opposites. You are my full self—exposed. You are infinite in action, which makes me infinite in becoming. This is my divine possibility. (Stay with this thought until it moves beyond words.) You, Brother Jesus, are my outrageously ignored and neglected soul. You are what we do to goodness. You are what we do to God. You are the outrageously ignored and neglected soul of every thing. You are what we do to what we should and could love. You are what we do to one another. You are what we do to the Reality right in front of us. You are what we do to ourselves. (Stay with this until it sinks in.) I hate and fear the very things that will save me. May this thought help me to love t...