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

by Richard Rohr

She is Everywoman and Everyman, and that is why I call her the feminine symbol for the universal incarnation. Mary is the Great Yes that humanity forever needs for Christ to be born into the world.

Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others. In art, she is invariably offering Jesus to the observer or inviting us to come to him.

As Pope Francis insists, the Eucharistic bread and wine are not a prize for the perfect or a reward for good behavior. Rather they are food for the human journey and medicine for the sick. We come forward not because we are worthy but because we are all wounded and somehow “unworthy.” “I did not come for the healthy, but for the sick,” Jesus said (Mark 2:17). One wonders how we were so successful at missing this central point. God gives us our worthiness, and objectively so!

It’s time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation, not punishment. (Read Ezekiel 16 for a supreme example of this.) We could call Jesus’s story line the “myth of redemptive suffering”—not as in “paying a price” but as in offering the self for the other, or “at-one-ment” instead of atonement!

We are indeed saved by the cross—more than we realize. The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness.

If we do not recognize that we ourselves are the problem, we will continue to make God the scapegoat—which is exactly what we did by the killing of the God-Man on the cross. The crucifixion of Jesus—whom we see as the Son of God—was a devastating prophecy that humans would sooner kill God than change themselves. Yet the God-Man suffers our rejection willingly so something bigger can happen.

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...

Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity.

Verse 14 gives us a good apologetic statement about Jesus’s resurrection, but the preceding verse strongly implies that the reason we can trust Jesus’s resurrection is that we can already see resurrection happening everywhere else.

Nothing is the same forever, says modern science. Ninety-eight percent of our bodies’ atoms are replaced every year. Geologists with good evidence over millennia can prove that no landscape is permanent. Water, fog, steam, and ice are all the same thing, but at different stages and temperatures. “Resurrection” is another word for change, but particularly positive change—which we tend to see only in the long run. In the short run, it often just looks like death.

myth does not mean “not true,” which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!

All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don’t believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead.

What happened at the Resurrection is that Jesus was fully revealed as the eternal and deathless Christ in embodied form. Basically, one circumscribed body of Jesus morphed into ubiquitous Light. Henceforth, light is probably the best metaphor for Christ or God.

Back in 1967, my systematic theology professor, Fr. Cyrin Maus, OFM, told me that if a video camera had been placed in front of the tomb of Jesus, it wouldn’t have filmed a lone man emerging from a grave (which would be resuscitation more than resurrection). More likely, he felt, it would’ve captured something like beams of light extending in all directions. In the Resurrection, the single physical body of Jesus moved beyond all limits of space and time into a new notion of physicality and light—which includes all of us in its embodiment. Christians usually called this the “glorified body,” and it is indeed similar to what Hindus and Buddhists sometimes call the “subtle body.”

The systems of this world are inherently argumentative, competitive, dualistic, and based on a scarcity model of God, mercy, and grace. They confuse retribution—what is often little more than crass vengeance—with the biblically evolved notions of healing, forgiveness, and divine mercy.

As long as you operate inside any scarcity model, there will never be enough God or grace to go around. Jesus came to undo our notions of scarcity and tip us over into a worldview of absolute abundance—or

Our word for this undeserved abundance is “grace”: “Give and there will be gifts for you: full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, poured into your lap” (Luke 6:38).

We can begin to understand that the Christ Mystery is not something we need to prove or even can prove, but a broad field that we can recognize for ourselves when we see in a contemplative way, which often will seem more symbolic and intuitive than merely rational, a more nondual mystery than anything that offers us mere binary choices as a false shortcut to wisdom.

if we have never loved deeply or suffered deeply, we are unable to understand spiritual things at any depth. Any healthy and “true” religion is teaching you how to deal with suffering and how to deal with love. And if you allow this process with sincerity, you will soon recognize that it is actually love and suffering that are dealing with you, like nothing else can! Even God has to use love and suffering to teach you all the lessons that really matter. They are his primary tools for human transformation.

whenever you were in that honeymoon stage of a new love, you were temporarily enjoying a kind of unitive, nondual, or contemplative mind. During that graced period, you had no time for picking fights or being irritated by nonessentials; you were able to overlook offenses, and even forgive your sisters and brothers and maybe even your parents. Mothers think that their sons with new girlfriends have been reborn! They are actually kind, and pick up their clothes; they even say “hello” and “pardon me.” I always loved giving pre-marriage instructions because the engaged couples were usually living in a highly teachable time,

Conversely, in the days, weeks, and years after a great grief, loss, or death of someone close to you, you often enter that same unitive mind, but now from another doorway. The magnitude of the tragedy puts everything else in perspective, and a simple smile from a checkout girl seems like a healing balm to your saddened soul. You have no time for or interest in picking fights, even regarding the stuff that used to bother you. It seems to take a minimum of a year to get back to “normal” after the loss of anyone you were deeply bonded to, and many times you never get back to “normal.” You are reconfigured forever. Often this is the first birth of compassion, patience, and even love, as the heart is softened and tenderized through sadness, depression, and grief. These are privileged portals into depth and truth.

Love and suffering lead us toward the beginnings of a contemplative mind if we submit to them at all, and many of us do submit to them for a while. Too often, though, most of us soon return to dualistic inner argumentation and our old, tired judgments, trying to retake control. Most of us leave this too-naked garden of Adam and Eve and enter instead into the fighting and competing world of Cain and Abel. Then we “settle in the land of Nod [or wandering], East of Eden” (Genesis 4:16), before we find ourselves longing and thirsting for what we once tasted in Eden. Perhaps we need to wander for a while to find the path—or before we want it badly enough.

“God comes to you disguised as your life,”

If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/resurrecting path of getting there. If Christ is the source and goal, then Jesus is the path from that source toward the goal of divine unity with all things.

And although Jesus made this quite clear throughout his life, we still largely turned Christianity into a religion where the operative agenda was some personal moral perfection, our attaining some kind of salvation, “going to heaven,” converting others rather than ourselves, and acquiring more health, wealth, and success in this world. In that pursuit, we ended up largely aligning with empires, wars, and colonization of the planet, instead of with Jesus or the powerless. All climbing and little descending, and it has all caught up with us in the twenty-first century.

suffering is seen as the practical and real price for letting go of illusion, false desire, superiority, and separateness. Suffering is also pointed out as the price we pay for not letting go, which might be an even better way to teach about suffering.

Both Christianity and Buddhism are saying that the pattern of transformation, the pattern that connects, the life that Reality offers us is not death avoided, but always death transformed. In other words, the only trustworthy pattern of spiritual transformation is death and resurrection. Christians learn to submit to trials because Jesus told us that we must “carry the cross” with him. Buddhists do it because the Buddha very directly said that “life is suffering,” but the real goal is to choose skillful and necessary suffering over what is usually just resented and projected suffering. In that the Buddha was a spiritual genius, and we Christians could learn a lot from him and his mature followers. For Christians, of course, the goal is divine love and not the overcoming of suffering. Yet look how many Buddhists become highly compassionate human beings. Both groups are saying that death and life are two sides of the same coin, and you cannot have one without the other. Each time you offer the surrender, each time you trust the dying, your faith is led to a deeper level and you discover a Larger Self underneath.

To be alive means to surrender to this inevitable flow. It’s the same pattern in every atom, in every human relationship, and in every galaxy. Native peoples, Hindu scripture, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus all saw it early in human history and named it as a kind of “necessary dying.” If this pattern is true, it has been true all the time and everywhere. Such seeing did not just start two thousand years ago. All of us travelers, each in our own way, have to eventually learn about letting go of something smaller so something bigger can happen. But that’s not a religion—it’s highly visible truth. It is the Way Reality Works. Yes, I am saying: That the way things work and Christ are one and the same. This is not a religion to be either fervently joined or angrily rejected. It is a train ride already in motion. The tracks are visible everywhere. You can be a willing and happy traveler, or not.

Practice is standing in the flow, whereas theory and analysis observe the flow from a position of separation.

Practice I: Simply That You Are First, “take God at face value, as God is. Accept God’s good graciousness, as you would a plain, simple, soft compress when sick. Take hold of God and press God against your unhealthy self, just as you are.” Second, know how your mind and will play their games: “Stop analyzing yourself or God. You can do without wasting so much of your energy deciding if something is good or bad, grace given or temperament driven, divine or human.” Third, be encouraged: “Offer up your simple, naked being to the joyful being of God, for you two are one in grace, although separate by nature.” And finally: “Don’t focus on what you are, but simply that you are! How hopelessly stupid would a person have to be if he or she could not realize that he or she simply is.” Hold the soft, warm compress of these loving words against your bodily self, bypass the mind and even the affections of the heart, and forgo any analysis of what you are, or are not. “Simply that you are!”

Practice II: All Physical Reality as a Mirror Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul. —Walt Whitman As I have often said, salvation is not a question of if but when. Once you see with God’s eyes, you will see all things and enjoy all things in proper and full perspective. Some put this off till the moment of death or even afterward (“purgatory” was our strange word for this). Salvation, for me, is simply to have the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), which Paul describes as “making the world, life and death, the present and the future—all your servants—because you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:22–23). Everything finally belongs, and you are a part of it. This knowing and this enjoying are a good description of salvation. I want to close this book with an extended Mirror Meditation I once wrote. The goal of this meditation is to rewire you—both in your mind and in your body—to see all things in God, and God in all things. I find that if you practice this kind of seeing regularly, it will soon become an entire way of life, in which the natural and physical world can work as a daily mirror for you, revealing parts of yourself that you might not know otherwise, revealing the deep patterns of things and, most of all, showing that what we say about the Christ is true: The outer world is a sacrament of God. Read this meditation slowly, in parts or as a whole. I...